A long time ago, in a dusty cow town far, far away (but not far *enough* away), I once wrote an academic paper on Web site statistics. FWIW, the paper was accepted for presentation at, and publication in the proceedings of, an annual meeting of the Western Decision Sciences Institute. Although some things have changed since that time (mid/late '90s), I'm still pretty skeptical about trying to ascertain hard figures for Web site visitor behavior.
Setting aside that lengthy introductory caveat, which should explain why my answer doesn't reference Web tracking services per se, I think a workable approach to analyzing the traffic that arrives at your site via a feed is to use unique links in the feed that redirect to the actual resource. (I suspect this may be heresy to some, so I'm donning my asbestos suit as I type...) I've recently put together a tool for that purpose for a client of mine, although it's not specific to RSS and involves much more manual work than an RSS-specific solution would warrant. Anyway, the goal would be to use (in the feed only) something like this: http://www.example.com/r.php?id=nnnnnnnnnn in place of the link to the actual content at: http://www.example.com/blog/myblog.php?article=aaaaa In this example, nnnnnnnnnn would uniquely identify the destination resource, and r.php would know to redirect traffic to the correct final destination after storing pertinent information about the arriving traffic. If that identifier is unique to the feed (and obviously unique within the feed), and is not used via any other promotion of the destination resource, then you'll know that any inbound traffic used your feed to get to that resource. Comments on this approach are welcome! Hopefully this will at least be food for thought... -- Stuart "Rattlesnake Stu" Whitmore ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) http://www.just-stuart.com/ On 6/8/05, Leah G Adelman/NYLIC <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > Anybody know anything about how to hook up your RSS feed to HitBox or other > web tracking services? I want to know how many people are using my feed or > accessing my site from the feed. > > Thanks > > > Leah Adelman > Corporate Internet > x7661 ------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor --------------------~--> What would our lives be like without music, dance, and theater? Donate or volunteer in the arts today at Network for Good! http://us.click.yahoo.com/Tcy2bD/SOnJAA/cosFAA/IRislB/TM --------------------------------------------------------------------~-> If you're getting "too much mail" then send a message to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] (this will tell it to stop sending you mail) To change your membership use THIS WEB PAGE: http://finance.groups.yahoo.com/group/syndic8/join (here you can set your mail to digest, no mail or LEAVE the list) To find more info about Syndicated XML newsfeeds visit http://www.syndic8.com/ Yahoo! Groups Links <*> To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/syndic8/ <*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
