Gordaen’s Blog

Yesterday, I posted a quick few paragraphs explaining that I’ve decided to do away with Feedburner. Rick Klau commented expressing interest in what caused me to be dissatisfied, so I’m following up on that with a basic analysis of what I liked and didn’t like about Feedburner.

What is it?
For those who don’t know, Feedburner is a utility that allows you to not only control the way a feed looks, but to view statistics on its uses (e.g., how many subscribers, how many clicks on each post, etc.). I was most interested in the statistics side of things, because I previously had no easy way of seeing how many people were even viewing my feed (manually checking the logs is too much work for someone like me), nor how it was being used. I started using Google Analytics to show me statistics on my site (excluding the feed) a little less than a year ago and have found the data invaluable, so I felt like I was blind to my feed usage in comparison.

Feedburner can show you how many subscribers you have (or have had at a given time) as well as what feed reader they are using (or what family in the case of readers like the “Universal Feed Parser“). You can also view Live Hits (the most recent Feed Readers to access the feed). Item Use allows you to see which posts have been clicked on. Uncommon Uses lets you see unrecognized Feed Readers (e.g., a custom script that grabs your feed). FB can also do a lot to modify/Optimize your feed (adding Geotagging, making the feed more readable, etc.), Publicize it, Monetize (for select members only), and “Troubleshootize.”

What isn’t it?
As many features as FB has, it left me wishing for more. The Live Hits section has a column for country, but there is no map showing where the hits are coming from. In fact, I didn’t see any other geographic details. Analytics has a map with dots of varying sizes that allows you to quickly see where your visitors are coming from, which is extremely useful for me (such as on my MR2 site when I’ve had times where the site was particularly popular in the German MR2 community and others and I have been able to check out the forums where people are talking about the site to see what is and isn’t working for them). Analytics also allows you to easily distinguish between new visitors and returning visitors (this is a little trickier with feeds, because many people could be getting the feeds through Google or another service that only reports the number of subscribers). FB seems to rely entirely on specific numbers rather than percentages, which is a minor complaint but a valid one nonetheless (particularly when comparing stats across feeds, 5 new subscribers might be great for one feed but minimal for another). Related to that point, FB seems to have more focus on “overall” rather than specifics. In other words, I can’t easily see the subscription or hits stats over time for a specific Feed Reader (though I could click on each day and compare them, if I had plenty of time on my hands).

Possible Confusion
When I check Feed Subscribers and set the time frame to All Time, FB shows me nearly thirty Feed Readers, several of which have zeros next to them (such as Relevant Noise). I am not sure whether these are listed because they have accessed my feed, but only a few times, so on average they have 0 subscribers (which is my guess) or if this is because these are the top Feed Readers or somehow more relevant. Interestingly enough, there’s an info/help button next to Hits below (which lets you see a better explanation as to what is a “hit”) but not next to Subscribers.

Final Thoughts
All things considered, Feedburner is a good service, but I wouldn’t call it “great.” It has quite a few features, but don’t expect the details that you have with Analytics. I’m not sure how many of my issues would be solved with the Pro service, so that’s a consideration to make if you’re willing to spend some money. I will say that my major concern with FB was that I was adding one more server into the equation and that’s just one more thing that can go wrong, but I never once noticed a problem with the service being down. Personally, I’ll do some experimenting with WordPress plugins to see what stats I can track (there are a few plugins already out there, so I’ll test them and possibly write my own in a few months). One final consideration you might make is that if your feed is getting some serious traffic, Feedburner allows you to hand those requests off to their server. If that’s the case, you might want to take advantage of their Pro services (and Monetize).