Hi All,
soory for posting again another cry for help on the same day. I found that WT claims to measure RSS feeds have started to gather interest frome more and more people out there, and, after researching the Advanced Config Guide (Nov. 2006 Ed. in which there isn't even one mention of the three letters!!), and consulting with tech support, I am not still so sure they are so measurable using WT...

A big condtion to do anything interesting involves using SDC/tag, but I believe javascripts don't do so well in the RSS world. I am thinking of using the "noscript" call, and add a parameter (ex. a mock WT.rss, or whatever) in order to track "visits"/views of the articles.

Anyone out there who has had the chance to tackle that question with great success?

Interesting question. I remember an interesting session with Ian Tickle about measuring the Web 2.0 but the session totally missed WebTrends' technical approach to actually do it. I'm curious to what WebTrends will respond to your question.

Hi,

This is what they responded. You'll see there are conditions in order to be able to do it:

When tracking an RSS feed, there are basically 3 events that we can track.

1. Tracking the feed itself, that is, how many times the feed went out an aggregator. We can get this by standard log file analysis from whatever server distributes the feeds. Simply edit the link that goes out to your content, (something like blah/blah2/feed.aspx?param1=foo¶m2=bar) and look for them in the logs. This may or may not be a useful statistic for you as it's going to cost a lot of page views, and it only tells you how many times the aggregators grabbed the feed from your server, not how many times it was viewed or clicked on.

2. Tracking article views. To do this you'll need a functioning SDC server. What we do here is simply insert a dcs.gif request of some type in the article description that goes out. When the article description is viewed in a tool that allows java, you can actually use the whole tag itself, in other viewers you may have to just accept using a hard coded dcs.gif request similar to the noscript portion of a standard tag (you'll loose the visitor tracking benefits of the SDC tag since we're not setting any cookies then, but you'll at least log a hit). Some viewers don't even allow images to load, so in that case we've got no way to track the article view.

3. Tracking article clickthroughs from the viewer to the article page. To do this, simply tag the target page with an SDC tag, and include whatever parameters you want in the link from the article description to the target page (for example, WT.rss=rss). You can then use whatever parameter based reporting you want in WebTrends to track this.

We can also use dcsmultitrack code to bind on-click events within the article description to track clickthroughs of different links and distinguish views from the aggregator from someone who bookmarks the link from their end browser.

I suppose one question that really needs to be answered is "what do you really want to track in your RSS feeds?" That is what this article is attempting to address. I'm sure there is more that you could do, depending on exactly what information you are trying to gather.

So, what information are you looking for? How many of the feeds are viewed by those who use the feed? Which articles within the feed are clicked on by users of the feed?

I'm not sure I agree that the SDC is required. You could put a feed specific query parameter on the article link in the feed (similar to a campaign ID) that gets recorded when they click on the link. Then create a custom report that uses a custom dimension based on that query parameter. If you want to get really fancy, you could even use a database to translate the parameter value into the article name (assuming you keep this in a database; a regular translation file would get awful big, but that could be used as well).

Tracking article views could be done much the same way as the SDC would record them. Put a hard-coded .gif request in the feed, make sure that .gif file exists on your own web server, make it 1x1 pixel so there's nothing to really see, and then add query parameters to that image. You can create a custom report that looks for those parameters just like you would for any normal page. You just need to insure that your profile is not filtering out images.

It might help if you specified what kind of metrics you are looking for, assuming you haven't enough answers already.

At first, we want to know how many subscribers the feeds get. We tried with the noscript option (to avoid inserting the javascrit tag in the feed), but it creates error in our in-house feed system.

Also, add to this that we are on OnDemand.

You don't want to use the <noscript> tag. You just want to create a standard HTML image tag. Like this:

<SRC IMG="http://statse.webtrendslive.com/<dcsid>/dcs.gif?dcsuri=/rssfeed&WT.rss=feed1"/>

That would make the feed just hit the collection server. The problem is, it's going to do that every time a particular item comes through on the feed. Unless you have some way of assigning a cookie to the user through the feed, detecting the cookie, and then not writing the image request to the feed if it has already been done once for that user, you are not going to get accurate visitor numbers. Visit numbers yes, but not visitors.

Hmmmm... just had a thought. If you used a parameter that was recorded in Visitor History, that would work. Maybe Page of Interest, which requires the use of WT.pi. Visitor History records the most recent 20 Pages of Interest for a given visitor. Then just use the Page of Interest Daily/Weekly/Monthly/Quarterly/Yearly/New Visitor measures, and you should get accurate visitor counts. This still depends on you being able to hard code the image request into the feed. It also depends on supplying a cookie to the visitor, and that cookie must be the same one used in your Session Tracking for the profile. Remember that Visitor History will not contain visitors that do not have a method stronger than IP/User Agent for Session Tracking.

quote:

2. Tracking article views. To do this you'll need a functioning SDC server. What we do here is simply insert a dcs.gif request of some type in the article description that goes out. When the article description is viewed in a tool that allows java, you can actually use the whole tag itself, in other viewers you may have to just accept using a hard coded dcs.gif request similar to the noscript portion of a standard tag (you'll loose the visitor tracking benefits of the SDC tag since we're not setting any cookies then, but you'll at least log a hit). Some viewers don't even allow images to load, so in that case we've got no way to track the article view.

3. Tracking article clickthroughs from the viewer to the article page. To do this, simply tag the target page with an SDC tag, and include whatever parameters you want in the link from the article description to the target page (for example, WT.rss=rss). You can then use whatever parameter based reporting you want in WebTrends to track this.

Hi,

can you pleasse give me more details around the below two items.

Basically I am trying to get the count of the number of views to a link on our page.

For point 2 that you mentioned, can you please give me a code example and maybe anything in webtrends that I need to do.

I am assuming that for 3, I will need to write a custom report, but how would i track each link individually. could you please elaborate.