Mastering New Media :: Jason Van Orden » Metrics

New Tool Gives You More Options for Analyzing Your FeedBurner Stats

Jason Van Orden — Fri, 07 Dec 2007 03:15:06 +0000

I love FeedBurner for tracking subscriber stats. I don’t like the limited views for my stats in their dashboard (the last 1, 7 or 30 days or all time). Blog Perfume has released a free tool for charting your FeedBurner stats that offers a few more time period options.

To use it you’ll need to enable the Awareness API for your feed. If you use the Feed Count badge on your site, then Awareness is already enabled.

Keep in mind that enabling Awareness opens up your stats to be used by developers in a tools such as this chart of Top 100 podcasts from Podfeed.net. If you don’t want to leave your feed stats open to developer scrutiny, you can temporarily enable Awareness, use the Blog Perfume tool and then disable Awareness again.

To enable Awareness on a FeedBurner feed:

Login to your FeedBurner account
Click on the name of the feed you want to enable it for
Click on the Publicize tab in the nav bar at the top
Click on Awareness API in the buttons on the left side
Click the Enable button

One creative use for this tool is to analyze the stats of another blog or podcast–perhaps one you want to advertise or partner with. If they have Awareness turned on, you’ll be able to analyze see the history of their stats.

Try it yourself. Let me know if it provides you any particularly interesting insights about your stats.

Google Feedfetcher Takes a Vacaton; FeedBurner Stats Dive

Jason Van Orden — Sun, 04 Nov 2007 18:09:29 +0000

Egad! Did your FeedBurner subscriber stats for yesterday (November 3) dive like mine? Well, rest easy. It’s only temporary. Google Feedfetcher failed to report numbers meaning all your subscribers who use Google Reader and iGoogle were not counted. Things should be back to normal when today’s stats are reported tomorrow morning.

Here’s the blog post from FeedBurner about it.

How to Upgrade to FeedBurner PRO Stats for Free

Jason Van Orden — Fri, 06 Jul 2007 06:13:07 +0000

How would you like to have FeedBurner PRO stats on your podcast or blog, including daily metrics on how many people have clicked on or viewed an item? Well you can have them and for free.

FeedBurner announced this week that their PRO stats are now free (another benefit from the acquisition by Google). But you need to activate the feature first to get the benefit. Here’s how.

1. Log in to your FeedBurner account

2. Click on the name of the feed that you want to upgrade

3. On the left-hand side, click on Item Use

4. Click on Upgrade to TotalStats now

5. On the next page, check the stats features that you want to enable then click the Save button

FeedBurner’s PRO TotalStats offer three additional metrics including:

Reach: the number of people who have viewed or clicked the content in your feed
Aggregate Item Use: an overview and history of total item use across your feed
Single Item Use: views and clicks of a single item over time

Reach is a very interesting engagement-type metric. It’s particularly useful for seeing how many people are viewing the show notes and clicking through to the site. From the FeedBurner blog, here’s an excellent explanation of “Reach.”

While the subscriber number is a measure of how many people have opted in to receive a feed, “Reach” is the total number of people who have taken action

Download Slides from All Six of My NAB Podcasting Summit Presentations

Jason Van Orden — Fri, 20 Apr 2007 01:31:34 +0000

Below you can download PDF files containing the slides for all six of the presentations I did last weekend in Las Vegas at the National Association of Broadcasting Podcasting Summit. They aren’t the most dynamic slides, so they will have more meaning to those who attended. But you can probably glean some other interesting tidbits of information from them.

Podcasting Metrics

Marketing Your Podcast

Promoting Your Business with Podcasting

Finding Your Voice – Choosing Your Topic (and Interacting with Your Audience)

Encoding Tools and Techniques for Video Podcasting

Building Buzz and Traffic for Your Podcast Through Social Media

Podcasting’s Dirty Little Secret: Podcast Listenership Hitting a Plateau?

Jason Van Orden — Fri, 23 Mar 2007 20:49:54 +0000

UPDATE: Podcasting News offers the thought that “podcasting appears to be somewhere between their Peak of Inflated Expectations and their Trough of Disillusionment.”, quoting Gartner’s Hype Cycle.

Earlier this week I reported on statistics from the upcoming Arbitron/Edison Internet and Multimedia 2007 report. Despite a healthy upswing in people who had heard of podcasting (37% up from 22% in 2006), there was only small incremental increase in the number of people who have ever listened to a podcast (13% up from 11% last year). I’d like to offer further insight and information and then get some feedback on this matter.

So what does this mean? I choose to see this as the end of a quick uptake of podcasting by early adopters and the beginning of a hill that needs to be surmounted. There are two things that we need to help us bust through this apparent plateau:

1. Better education of the audience

Many people still think you need an iPod or other MP3 player to listen to podcasts. For that matter, many think that Apple invented it. People need to know that a podcast is really nothing more than portable, on-demand, digital (oh wait…look at that…P.O.D.) content. We need to emphasize the benefits of podcasting: time-shifted, niche content, listen when you want and listen where you want.

2. Creation of better, easier-to-use solutions

Podcasts need to be much easier to find, subscribe to and consume. We need better solutions. Right now iTunes is the most frictionless solution for finding and subscribing to podcasts. This only contributes to the misconceptions I pointed out above. In addition, there are a lot of things that iTunes could do better. We need a viable competitor to iTunes since competition only helps push innovation. I’m not sure who that could be, but it’s needed.

Tom Webster, who presented the stats in London, offers some great insights.

On the other hand, this is 13% of America we are talking about–and while I am not…yet…at liberty to release the percentage of Americans this year who subscribe to Satellite Radio, it is pretty close. So, on the one hand, growth is relatively small, but on the other, podcasting has acheived a similar penetration to Satellite Radio, without the benefit of a honkin’ big marketing campaign, Howard Stern, or Oprah.

So podcasting has an audience that rivals satellite.

Consumer-controlled content is clearly the future for both audio and video, and podcasting, by whatever name you choose to call it, is the precursor to that vision of the future. But realizing that vision takes vision–and persistence. If you think podcasting isn’t “broken,” think on these graphs again…Somewhere, though, somebody will see this data for what it is–a challenge to work harder, to claim the greater prize. Some of you reading this will do the work to make podcasting different, and better, than it is today–and those people have the opportunity to reap great rewards.

Very well put. And with that…what do you think? What do these numbers mean for podcasting?

FeedBurner Gets Cooler and Cooler | Headline Animator Stats

Jason Van Orden — Fri, 02 Mar 2007 21:54:19 +0000

I’ve talked in the past about Headline Animator and I also mentioned it in my book. Not only have FeedBurner been souping up the Headline Animator features, but they’ve also now added stats for tracking it.

Podcasting Metrics Series Pt 9 | How Much is Your Podcast Worth?

Jason Van Orden — Tue, 20 Feb 2007 22:12:51 +0000

It’s been a little while since I added to the series on podcast metrics. We’ve already gone over some of the usual statistics such as downloads, subscribers and bandwidth that give you an idea of the size of your audience. But there are a myriad of other statistics, beyond the size of your audience, that help determine the overall value or success of your podcast.

How Would Your Podcast Sell For?

Let me ask you this question: if you were to sell your podcast today, how much would it be worth? Answering this question is an interesting way to measure the current success of your podcast.

Recently I talked about selling your podcast as a way to make money or as an alternative to podfading (letting your show fizzle). Along the same lines, I found an interesting post on selling a blog. Everything in the article applies to podcasts as well.

A List of Criteria for Determining the Worth of a Podcast

One of the most interesting things to be gleaned from this post is a list of criteria that a buyer might want to know in order to determine the value of your podcast. Whether or not you’re planning to sell your podcast or blog, there’s a lot to be learned by watching these criteria over time to track the increasing (or decreasing) value of your site and content.

Here are the items I’ve picked out from the article and my own experience.

Current income sources
Average monthly income
Income history/trends
Sales
Monthly traffic (i.e. unique visitors, page views, etc)
Traffic history/trends
Recent traffic spikes from important sites
Amount of search engine traffic
List of which keywords are bringing in the most traffic
# of inbound links listed in Google
Types of inbound links (are there some from quality longterm sites)
# of feed subscribers
Feed subscriber history/trends
Google Page Rank
SEOMoz.org’s PageStrength
Technorati ranking
Type of blogging platform
Alexa Rank
Age of the site/blog
Number of posts
# of email list subscribers
Past press coverage

Engagement Metrics

I’d also add engagement-type stats such as:

Average # of comments per post
Average length of a visitor’s stay on site
How many times has content on your site been bookmarked on a site such as del.icio.us
Statistics on specific actions taken by readers/listeners (i.e. email optin, video streaming, clicking an ad link)

Track the Value of Your Podcast

Whether you’re interested in selling your podcast or not, each of these criteria is worth watching in order to track your overall success as well as the increasing (or decreasing) value of your site and content.

You might not need to look at all the items listed above, but depending on your goals you should outline a set of metrics that will give you a regular snapshot of how you are doing. Some metrics you might want to check weekly. Others you might just check monthly.

What have I missed? Is there anything else that you watch in order to track the success of your podcast?

NOTE: For now I’m going to leave the metrics series at that. We’ve covered a good podcasting stats foundation. Though, I could teach a full day course on the subject. So I’m sure we’ll return to the subject eventually.

Google Reader Now Reporting Subscriber Numbers to FeedBurner

Jason Van Orden — Mon, 19 Feb 2007 16:48:05 +0000

You might have noticed a jump in your subscriber numbers in FeedBurner over the last few days. It’s because Google is now reporting the number of people subscribed to your feed using their service. Previously they just checked the feed content without giving this number. This includes people who are using Google Reader as well as Google Personal Home Page.

This will affect both blogs and podcasts since some people are using Google as a podcatcher.

On this blog I experienced a 30-40% jump in my stats. I guess there are more of you reading this blog than I knew.

Podcasting Metrics Series Pt 8 | The Ups and Downs of Subscriber Stats

Jason Van Orden — Tue, 16 Jan 2007 18:57:01 +0000

In the last post on podcast metrics, I talked about measuring the number of listeners who are subscribed to your feed. In this installment of the Podcasting Metrics Series, I’d like to address an issue that you might have wondered about when looking at your subscriber stats.

If you look at a graph of feed subscribers mapped out by each day, you’ll notice that it usually resembles a rollercoaster–dipping lowest over the weekend. Don’t worry. This doesn’t mean that your joke at the end of your last episode bombed and listeners promptly unsubscribed. This up and down movement is a natural phenomenon. Why is this?

Let’s think it through. Daily subscriber stats are based on how many people access your feed on a given day. A lot of subscribers are using podcatching software such as iTunes. If a subscriber doesn’t open iTunes on a given day, your feed won’t be checked by him. This means he won’t show up in your stats for that day.

When do most people leave their computers off? Usually it’s on the weekend when they’re not on their computer at work or more likely out doing something else (I should take a lesson from them and step away from my computer now and again). This is why you’ll see your subscriber stats dip on the weekend. Less people are on their computer meaning less people open their podcatchers leading to a lower stat count.

When examining your subscriber stats, it’s more important to watch the general trend of the peaks and troughs of your graph. So now you can start sweating about your comedic delivery and recognize that the rollercoaster effect is to be expected.

Also keep in mind, if you’re using FeedBurner the stats are delayed by a day. The numbers for Sunday show up on Monday.

Podcasting Metrics Series Pt 7 | Measuring Podcast Subscriber Stats

Jason Van Orden — Wed, 03 Jan 2007 23:23:47 +0000

So far we’ve discussed how to measure the size of your audience by tracking downloads and bandwidth.

Another important podcasting metric to track is the number of subscribers that you have. Even though subscribers only represent a portion of your total listenership, it’s worthwhile knowing how many of your listeners have taken the step to automatically receive new content from you. It can be argued that this is typically a more engaged listener.

So how do we identify a subscriber and distinguish him/her from other listeners? A subscriber is someone who has entered your feed address into a podcatcher. A subscriber can be identified as a unique user (probably identified by unique IP address) who is checking your feed on a regular basis.

Proper tracking of subscribers requires filtering out aggregators, directories and other automated bots accessing your feed (these don’t usually represent actual listeners). For this reason, it’s difficult to track subscribers by simply looking at hits to a feed file. Some web analytics platforms are not equipped to give you accurate insight into your subscriber stats. You need tools that are geared specifically to feed metrics.

FeedBurner is one such tool. They watch a list of over 8000 (and growing) different automated bots to help sort out hits to the feeds they host. They recently provided this excellent inside peek into their methodology.

Other tools/services for tracking subscribers include RadioTail Ripple and Podpress.