Even after all that’s been written and explained, even reputable online marketing publications such as ClickZ.com still don’t get RSS metrics.

In an otherwise good RSS marketing article, Add RSS to Your Marketing Mix, Heidi Cohen has this to say about RSS metrics:

“From a marketing perspective, RSS’s measurability is still evolving and therefore limited. You can’t tell who has received your feeds as you can with e-mail.“

Yes, RSS’s measurability is still evolving and probably will evolve beyond e-mail metrics. In some ways it already has …

And it’s also true that you can’t tell who has received your feeds … if you’re using the most established RSS approaches and just the basic technologies.

However, once you connect your feeds with your existing user databases, you can in fact go beyond what e-mail metrics offer.

Here are some possibilities …

a] Use the “unique feed URL” approach, where each subscriber receives a feed with a unique identifier, based on which you can track precisely what feeds are being requested … namely what annonymous user is requesting what feed.

b] If you’d like to integrate annonymous feed subscriber data with named (registered) user data, you can easily provide feeds only upon registration or only to logged-in users, and actually connect each unique feed URL with a named user. Especially if you provide feed customization this won’t be a problem at all. Once you’ve integrated this data you can measure every and any iteraction your user has with your feed.

Continue reading at MarketingStudies.net