For most marketers RSS metrics are still a gray area, although in fact RSS is completely measurable, even more so than e-mail.

As complexity grows with added capabilities, were only taking a look at the absolute basics of measuring your RSS feeds today. These are the basics you can implement immediately to see how youre doing, and then gradually move on to more complex analyses.

As always, the key point is just to get started and then move on from there.

1. THE REASONS FOR MEASURING RSS

The most basic reasons for measurement are quite simple:

A] How many people are subscribing to my RSS feed? Is the number increasing or decreasing?

If the number of readers is decreasing, its a sign that your content is not meeting the needs of the target audiences your site attracts, consequently meaning that you need to consider improving your content strategy.

Optimization possibilities include: --> More practical how-to articles --> Different content topics --> More personal voice --> Greater publishing frequency (more frequent posts) --> Less frequent posts --> Longer or shorter posts --> More news coverage within your industry --> Etc.

Also, based on your readership youll be able to calculate your readership --> purchases conversion rate, if youre using your site to sell products online. The simple formula to calcuate this is the number of orders / number of readers * 100.

B] Are my subscribers actually clicking on the content items in the RSS feed?

If you find that your subscribers are actually opening the feed, but not clicking on individual content items its a clear sign that either your content item headlines need to be improved, made more attractive, or that the actual content is not strong enough to entice readers to clickthrough.

Knowing your feed-to-website clickthrough rates will also enable you to introduce gradual changes in your content strategy and actually see how they improve or hurt your key success metrics.

These two questions are of course only the most basic, but will enable you to build on them in the future and start developing more advanced measurement & optimization procedures.

2. THE TOOLS

Now that you know what youll start tracking youll need appropriate tools to actually help you measure your RSS feeds.

If youre using any of the more advanced RSS marketing & publishing solutions (http://www.simplefeed.com, http://www.nooked.com, http://myst-technology.com, http://www.rssautopublisher.com, http://www.press-feed.com/, http://www.market-soft.com/bypass/, http://www.silverpop.com), the key metrics will already be provided to you out-of-the-box.

If not, youll need to use a specific service just to conduct your measurements. For small-business marketers, the best choices are http://www.feedburner.com or http://www.pheedo.com, which come at no charge for the basic toolset.

Using them is quick and simple: just go to their site, register for a free account, enter your existing RSS feed URL, start promoting the new RSS feed URL (given to you by the service) on your site, instead of the one you are using right now, and start measuring.

But be careful! These two RSS measurement solutions actually create a new RSS feed URL for you, which is hosted on their own server, meaning that you only want to use it to generate real subscribers, and not actually submit the feed to any RSS search engines and directories. If you do so, some of the SEO benefits of RSS will unfortunatelly be wasted.

Copyright 2005 Rok Hrastnik