BBU’s RSS Feed Campaign Tagger Plugin for WordPress
What is BBU’s RSS Feed Campaign Tagger (RFCT)?
That’s quite a mouthful but I’d rather be clear than ambiguous with a WordPress plugin name.
BBU’s RSS Feed Campaign Tagger, as the name implies, allows you to tag links in your WordPress RSS feed. It readies the links in the RSS feed for tracking with Google Analytics.
Installation
- Download BBU’s RSS Feed Campaign Tagger (RFCT)
- Unzip on your computer
- Upload the directory bbu-rfct to your /wp-content/plugins directory.
- Go to the plugin management page and enable the plugin.
- That’s it!
What Does BBU’S RSS Feed Campaign Tagger Solve?
Email, banner ads, pay per click, you name it. Marketers are tracking clicks like crazy to determine goals and conversions.
But what about RSS feed?
How many RSS subscribers who click on your link(s) and buy your product, send a donation, etc?
How responsive your RSS subscribers are to your offer in comparison to your e-newsletter subscribers?
This is exactly the kind of problem BBU’s RFCT solves. No, currently it is far from perfect but early tests on my blog and a few other friends look promising.
At the very least, getting some metrics / numbers to crunch in this case is better than nothing at all.
Who Needs This Plugin?
Every WordPress user out there. Seriously, here are just some ideas you could do with this plugin. If you find a need for one of them, this is for you:
- Tou want to know whether your RSS subscribers are reading your posts and actually click on the links to your site.
- You need to identify the most wanted response on your blog. Should you turn visitors into RSS or email subscribers?
- As a marketer, you should know the number of sales generated from your latest blog post. How many clicks specifically come from your RSS feed? How many of them turn into buyers?
- You need to track the responsiveness of your RSS subscribers in comparioson to other marketing channels for whatever goals you define on your blog / blog site.
- And more…
Note: Just to make this clear, BBU’ RFCT doesn’t track. It is just a tagger. If you read the introductory paragraphs carefully, it actually does really simple thing, but an important one…
Why You Want to Install BBU’s RFCT
Google Analytics allows you to track campaigns, sources, medium and other things. Marketers should make use of that feature.
It is easy to implement, but not for RSS feed — considering how WordPress works right now.
If you embed a tracking URL for RSS feed on your blog, your blog visitors will click on the link, resulting in skewed data about your traffic.
RSS Feed Campaign Tagger leaves your links as is when WordPress displays it on your blog, but it adds this tracking code — also called tagging — when it is syndicated via RSS feed.
But, We Already Have FeedBurner!
Google’s FeedBurner is a great tool but it doesn’t track things beyond your RSS feed. Sure, with the PRO version — which is free since Google acquired FeedBurner — you are able to see views and clicks information.
The problem is, FeedBurner only tracks clicks on the title of your RSS items. If you ask the readers to click on to a landing page, that’s not tracked.
When you put a tracking link in your blog post, you get the overall clicks instead of clicks specific to RSS feeds.
Again, this is a simple idea, necessary for marketers yet no one has ever tracked it specifically.
Technical Information, Issues, FAQs, etc
- RFCT only tags links in RSS feed which reside on the same domain as the RSS feed itself. While you can track outgoing links with Google Analytics (GA), my early focus with this plugin is to be able to track conversions for the goals I set inside GA.
- Clicks resulting from web-based RSS readers may leave a trail, i.e. your web browser provides referral information but not all RSS readers include such information. Tagging links in your blog’s RSS feed allows you to track clicks from all RSS readers.
- If visitors come to your site by clicking on the news item inside Firefox Live bookmark, they are clicking the title, so FeedBurner will track it — if you enable that feature.
- FeedBurner’s email subscribers will be tagged as RSS readers too. After all, they subscribe to your RSS feed via email. That’s just how it works.
- Sites that syndicate your WordPress RSS feed will also be tagged as RSS campaign. Perhaps in future versions, I’ll add an option to choose to track online RSS readers and disable tracking other web sites at the same time. Either case, I haven’t come up with a clean solution for this.
- RFCT also tags your headline / post title. It works side by side with FeedBurner. In fact, what FeedBurner will see are tagged links.
- Remember: You don’t have to set anything in Google Analytics if you only want to track clicks. But if you need to track conversions and clickstreams, set those up in your GA account.
Free Support
Free community support is available via the blogging forums.
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