I read about the tracking of feed views…
…that WP.com is automatically doing of my posts the other day, but didn’t play with the new feature right away. My loss. This is great stuff.
For any posts, I can now see how many times the article is read in a feed reader in addition to how many times is is read on this site. Interestingly, it appears that any given blog post on 4realz gets between 100 and 200 views from feed readers.
What does this mean for 4realz traffic?
On a recent article about Altos Research, you can see that almost all the traffic came from “syndicated views” or feed readers.
Whereas on my recent post about Zillow’s auction patent, most of the traffic came from links from other blogs, so this chart looks very different:
This is good stuff and I’ll be fascinated to see how the syndicated views change over time.
Posted: January 14th, 2008 under 4realz.
Tags: analytics, blogging, feed, traffic, wp.com
Comments
Comment from Dustin
Time January 14, 2008 at 11:51 pm
I was wondering about that except I think that most of the people who use a feed reader will likely just view every feed post. (at least I do using Google Reader) and if they don’t view ever feed post, then it is just random which ones they will see. I’m thinking this is really only useful to gauge active feed readers, but it is a fun tool nonetheless!
Comment from Mike Mueller
Time January 15, 2008 at 8:02 am
I wonder if it also takes into account how I just read this article.
My Google Feed Reader sows up also in my iGoogle home page as a widget. So I read the full article but never entered my feed Reader - just the iGoogle balloon.
Just thinkin…
Comment from Dustin
Time January 15, 2008 at 12:09 pm
Mike: I just looked at the source of the feed and it is pretty clear that the WP.com team has added an invisible tracking pixel at the bottom of each post in the feed. This means that if the iGoogle balloon displays images, then the tool would track that “view”… Otherwise no. 
Comment from Jessie B
Time January 14, 2008 at 11:21 pm
Over time you can probably see a trend in Feed vs. Link views and gauge the type of reader the articles attract, i.e. techie = feed vs. traditional agent = links.