Comments on: Monish Datta: “I can’t believe Sasha skipped WAW for the US-Mexico World Cup Qualifier!” http://www.gilliganondata.com/index.php/2009/02/12/monish-datta-i-cant-believe-sasha-skipped-waw-for-the-us-mexico-world-cup-qualifier/ Thoughts, musings, and, hopefully, not too many redundancies on the world of business data. If you missed the irony in the previous sentence, you may struggle with my writing style. Tue, 07 Feb 2012 18:26:03 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.3.1 By: Tim Wilson http://www.gilliganondata.com/index.php/2009/02/12/monish-datta-i-cant-believe-sasha-skipped-waw-for-the-us-mexico-world-cup-qualifier/comment-page-1/#comment-15019 Tim Wilson Sun, 15 Feb 2009 18:56:31 +0000 http://www.gilliganondata.com/?p=227#comment-15019 RSS has always raised challenges on the tracking front. You can track the number of subscribers by using something like Feedburner. But, that's obviously not enough. So, the next question is, "Can I track how many people are viewing my content in their reader?" Traditionally -- very tough. That's one of the reasons that many sites only include a teaser in the RSS feed and require a clickthrough to view the full content (cnn.com and nytimes.com are both guilty of this "hurt the user experience in the interest of better tracking" sin). IF the feed includes a parameter in all of the "read more" links from their posts, then any WA package can pick that up and determine that the page view came from an RSS feed clickthrough. One case where a company is trying to really push the envelope on RSS tracking without damaging the user experience is Eloqua and their marketing automation platform. Check out this post over at the Bulldog Solutions site for a summary of what can be done on that front: http://blog.bulldogsolutions.com/2008/07/18/you-mean-i-can-track-individual-rss-subscribers/ (I don't think the demo is actually still running on the e-mail notification front). Basically, Eloqua generates a GUID for each subscriber to an RSS feed created using their tool That GUID then gets slapped on the end of every link that gets posted to the feed. Once a user clicks through, that GUID helps them stitch together who clicked through and on what. It's not bulletproof by any means -- if I sent you an Eloqua-generated RSS feed and you added it to your feed reader, Eloqua would think you were me! My information is a little dated there, but if you track down @stevewoods on Twitter, I'm sure either he or someone at Eloqua would be happy to talk you through their approach. RSS has always raised challenges on the tracking front. You can track the number of subscribers by using something like Feedburner. But, that’s obviously not enough. So, the next question is, “Can I track how many people are viewing my content in their reader?” Traditionally — very tough. That’s one of the reasons that many sites only include a teaser in the RSS feed and require a clickthrough to view the full content (cnn.com and nytimes.com are both guilty of this “hurt the user experience in the interest of better tracking” sin). IF the feed includes a parameter in all of the “read more” links from their posts, then any WA package can pick that up and determine that the page view came from an RSS feed clickthrough.

One case where a company is trying to really push the envelope on RSS tracking without damaging the user experience is Eloqua and their marketing automation platform. Check out this post over at the Bulldog Solutions site for a summary of what can be done on that front: http://blog.bulldogsolutions.com/2008/07/18/you-mean-i-can-track-individual-rss-subscribers/ (I don’t think the demo is actually still running on the e-mail notification front).

Basically, Eloqua generates a GUID for each subscriber to an RSS feed created using their tool That GUID then gets slapped on the end of every link that gets posted to the feed. Once a user clicks through, that GUID helps them stitch together who clicked through and on what. It’s not bulletproof by any means — if I sent you an Eloqua-generated RSS feed and you added it to your feed reader, Eloqua would think you were me! My information is a little dated there, but if you track down @stevewoods on Twitter, I’m sure either he or someone at Eloqua would be happy to talk you through their approach.

]]> By: Dave Ruen http://www.gilliganondata.com/index.php/2009/02/12/monish-datta-i-cant-believe-sasha-skipped-waw-for-the-us-mexico-world-cup-qualifier/comment-page-1/#comment-14887 Dave Ruen Fri, 13 Feb 2009 17:59:46 +0000 http://www.gilliganondata.com/?p=227#comment-14887 Thanks again Tim. Great stuff. Looking forward to using WASP around our web properties. If not for the decibel level at Bar Louie I wanted to see if anyone was tracking RSS feeds and the process behind it. I've seen and deduced that you could with a tracking code when the link is on your site and someone says, that looks really great and puts it into their RSS reader. But is it possible to track when the user actually clicks on the link from their RSS reader say three days later? It’s kinda the front end and back end tracking. Front end being from your site and then the backend from their reader when they click on the topic. Any experiences or guidance on that would be great. See you guys next month. Thanks again Tim. Great stuff. Looking forward to using WASP around our web properties.

If not for the decibel level at Bar Louie I wanted to see if anyone was tracking RSS feeds and the process behind it. I’ve seen and deduced that you could with a tracking code when the link is on your site and someone says, that looks really great and puts it into their RSS reader. But is it possible to track when the user actually clicks on the link from their RSS reader say three days later? It’s kinda the front end and back end tracking. Front end being from your site and then the backend from their reader when they click on the topic.

Any experiences or guidance on that would be great.

See you guys next month.

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