If you have been subscribing to my blog feed via RSS or email, you might have noticed that over the past several months, links in my feed point to the site www.feedplusplus.com. Here’s some insight into the whats and the whys.

I started Feedpluplus as a personal project in an effort to get additional analytics data on my feed subscribers. FeedBurner does a decent job at estimating the number of feed subscribers, email subscribers, reach etc. However, it does not provide any data on what links were clicked from within your feed.

So for example, this post that I did on Monday provides a link to Andrew Chen’s blog. Feedburner does not provide any data on how many people clicked on that link. Or where the links originated from. In fact there’s no other service available that will provide you that data. I started working on FeedPlusPlus in an effort to collect this data. It is mainly a url redirection service – think of it as TinyURL but for the links in your RSS feeds. So, when you click on a link from within my feed, you get forwarded to FeedPlusPlus, which redirects you to the original link. But before doing that, does the analytics bit of it.

Using FeedPlusPlus, I know that 62 people clicked on the link, of which majority originated from Bombay, Bangalore, Pune and Delhi (dont worry – no private data collected). The analytics is then sliced by different views – a daily analysis, a monthly analysis (list of all the links clicked over the last 30 days grouped together by the url), a geo-mapped view etc.

Here’s a sample screenshot for a geo mapped view for the link to Google NoticeBoard app in this post.

Many people dont like the url shortening / obfuscating services. However, this problem (collecting analytics for links within feed items) has no other solution. Javascript will not run correctly in Google Reader and several other RSS Readers.  I have used it successfully for the past few months to get amazing insight into what links people click and what links they dont. It provides me great feedback on what sort of content my readers will be interested in. The site is implemented in Django and was a great way to hone my Django skills as well.

If you are a blogger, would you find such a service useful ? If there’s interest from other bloggers, I might consider opening it up to others as well.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 18th, 2009 at 11:51 am and is filed under Personal. You can follow any comments to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.