This is the first of many How to Video’s I am going to be creating throughout the course of 2008. I go into brief detail on how to setup a meta refresh on a intermediary page, thus allowing google analytics to track RSS subscribers, for any blog using feedburner.
Please take note in the video I mention Meta Redirect when in reality I am talking about the Meta Refresh.
Here is the code you are going to want to use to make this work on your blog:
<META HTTP-EQUIV=”refresh” content=”1;URL=/feed”>
(note: you might have to manually add the double quotation marks if you are copy and pasting the above code into your WYSIWYG web editor.)
Simply attach that in your <Head> </Head> tag on your “intermediary page”, eg., brianchappell.com/subscribe.php on my blog. Then point your link to refresh to the physical feed page on your blog. (if you are using wordpress then it default’s to whatever.com/feed) After that is set up, drop your google analtyics code within the <Body> </Body>
It is as simple as that. Wait 24 hours, and you should start seeing your goal reports popping up.
Keep an eye out for a more detailed post on how to also make this work with Google click tracking using javascript tagging.
Also take kindly in understanding this is my first attempt at video creation, so it’s FAR from perfect. 
SlideShare
Twitter
LinkedIn
StumbleUpon
Buzz
Facebook
Youtube
Flickr
{ 1 trackback }
{ 13 comments… read them below or add one }
Nice Brian … hadn’t considered that before, but it helps solve a problem I’ve had! Thanks!
Hi Brain, there is of course a small problem with this
rel=”alternate” type=”application/rss+xml” title=”Brian Chappell RSS Feed” href=”http://www.brianchappell.com/feed/
Some feed readers will perform the redirect before you confirm subscription, and some will end up trying to hit http://www.brianchappell.com/subscribe.php every time they check your feed, and in many cases not finding anything.
I am actually thinking about experimenting without autodiscovery, but that might cause some problems
Interesting point Andy. I think the better way to inevitably set this up is with click tracking. It is probably a little more accurate, but is a little more complex to set up properly.
I’m actually preparing a campaign where my analytics solution is click-tracking. I’ll be blogging about it after about a month. The advantage there is that you can see which call to action got the click.
@ Gab
You are exactly right, and doing so alleviates the issues Andy so kindly pointed out above.
Hopefully, Google will just buy Feedburner soon and integrate those stats with Analytics.
@ Dan
Google actually owns feedburner, heh. As of last year
This is still really cool! Nice post!
I setup up outbound click tracking to track outgoing clicks on the rss links. See here: http://www.google.com/support/googleanalytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=55527
Very easy to setup and no redirect to worry about.
will this only work with <META HTTP-EQUIV=â€refresh†or does it also work with “location.replace” (javascript) or “<?php header (“Location:##….” (php)
that is a good question, I am not enough of a code buff to answer one way or the other. I am not exactly sure.
However, I am about to make a post on how to do this with the onclick event which IMO is much better way to attack this issue and might resolve your question.
It seems like it should work with, at least, the javascript if I put the location.replace in the body tag using onload=”location.replace(myURL)”. Because then the page has to actually load before the forwarding url get executed. However, I’m not sure if the Google tracking scripts execute in this circumstance.
Does anyone out there know?
Brian,
Where’s the post about doing this with onclick event? Look forward to seeing it soon, as I’m trying to implement this on my blog.