MEGO: My Eyes Glaze Over

Burning Questions about Feedburner

May 18, 2008 Blogs, Marketing & Communication, RSS, Search Marketing, Web Analytics, Web Tools & Applications

I am not sure if it is simply a symptom of being a junior blogger (I have been blogging for less than two years) or if all bloggers suffer from analytic-obsession-disorder.

On a semi-regular basis I check Google Analytics to see who is visiting my site. I look for the following information:

• View the map to see where my visitors come from (last month 29 different countries, majority from US)
• I love to look up Network Location to see if any interesting companies have been visiting, especially to see if any companies I may have written about came to see what I said.
• Traffic is fascinating (really it is!). How did people come to find me? Was I already on their list and they came direct? Did they search for MEGOAgain? Or for my name? Did they search for something truly bizarre and happen to locate my blog? (Most bizarre this month “cliff stoll by coats” and “animals that work well together”)

I also check Wordpress plugin “Wassup”, which gives me stats for the last 24 hours, 7 days, month or year. Most of the time these stats don’t match up with Google Analytics and vice versa. But it gives me an idea of traffic to my site.

Then there is Feedburner. Every couple weeks I will login to Feedburner. My understanding is that Feedburner should show me my subscribers. And, it will show me how they are subscribed (Bloglines, Google Reader etc). What I can’t figure out is why it fluctuates on a daily basis. If I had thousands of subscribers I could understand that frequently subscribers would add you or remove you..and you would see a drop or an increase everyday. However, I regularly see an increase or a decrease of 10-20% from one day to another. On days when I post it always increases…so then I begin to think perhaps it is showing me those subscribers that visit that day – rather than subscribers that exist on that particular day.

According to Feedburner help: “FeedBurner’s subscriber count is based on an approximation of how many times your feed has been requested in a 24-hour period.” – So does that mean that within the feed aggregator  a person clicked on my blog to read it? Or does it mean that the feed aggregator tried to update or retrieve any new posts?

Can anybody out there shed some light on this for me?

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