By : Admin

World’s largest search Google has acquired FeedBurner for a sum of $100 million. FeedBurner is a popular RSS feed Management Company. Chicago-based FeedBurner was founded in 2003 and has raised just $10 million in capital over two rounds. The move means Google advertisers will have another, new avenue for their marketing and FeedBurner’s more than 430,000 publishers will be able to join the Google Adsense publisher network.

FeedBurner’s Web-based tools, including a feed and blog advertising network, can help publishers promote, deliver, and monetize their content on the web and make feed-based content more accessible and manageable for its end users.

There will be a number of possible implications of Google’s latest acquisition however; expectations are high that Google will take advantage of FeedBurner’s analytics and advertising capabilities.

People using Google Analytics, can look forward to the likely merger of FeedBurner’s RSS feed analytics and Google Analytics! This would centralize all Web site performance analytics into one convenient interface.

Predictions are also high that Google will also incorporate FeedBurner statistics into its organic search ranking algorithm. Let’s look at the reasons why our Google search results aren’t likely to be hampered by feed subscription counts.

Backlash Possibility – Should Google decide to incorporate RSS feed subscription count to the algorithm, there would be the inevitable backlash. Buying and selling feed subscriptions would suddenly generate millions in revenue for those attempting to secure a high ranking. The RSS subscription count would become worthless overnight. While there would still be people legitimately subscribing to feeds, the inflation would be so extreme as to ensure that search results are completely unreliable.

FeedBurner Supremacy – The second problem is one of FeedBurner supremacy. While FeedBurner may indeed be the most popular feed reporting service, many sites use Pheedo or they rely upon a simple RSS system based on a WordPress or other blog software theme. I can currently subscribe to most RSS feeds using my Firefox browser. Even if a site uses FeedBurner, I don’t have to click on the FeedBurner button to subscribe, which means that the FeedBurner counter is inaccurate. With this in mind, Google would be penalizing every site that uses Pheedo or simple RSS systems.

Static Web Sites – The third problem with relying on subscription numbers for authority is the simple truth that there are thousands of static Web sites that do not offer a single RSS feed. Too many static sites exist with no blog, no press release section, and no regularly added content. While we obviously don’t recommend static Web sites to most clients, their continued existence is inevitable. Some of the oldest sites on the Web with 11 or 12 years under their belts have no RSS feed.

While Google Blog Search results may be affected by the RSS feed count, the standard Google search won’t be able to take subscription counts into consideration unless Google decided its priceless reputation was suddenly unimportant.

No, we can continue to expect the value of the inbound link to remain. The SEO speculators will have to find another conspiracy to adopt. Google isn’t going to do anything radical to damage its popularity or preeminence in the realm of search.

Spread the word: related/bookmark it/readit

By : Nidhi Gupta

Content management systems—Analytics friend or foe?

Many sites today are driven by content management systems (CMS), which allow non-technical users to create and manage content.

Integrating your analytics data collection into your CMS is one of the single biggest opportunities to streamline and automate your reporting. Site tagging and measurement should be a byproduct of your content publishing process. Here are a few examples:

• Content Groups: Analytics tools can organize individual pages into higher level user-defined groups. As you plan the content organization for your website and set up a CMS, align each content area to the desired analytics content group. You can then extend the CMS to automatically set the appropriate content group tags on each page. As new content is added, the content groups are dynamically added and fed directly into your reports. This is an elegant solution which reduces ongoing tagging work and can make grown analysts weep for joy.

• Page Titles: Most reports use the contents of the HTML “title” element as the name of the page. However, page titles are often completely meaningless and fail to provide context to the content of the pages. Most analytics solutions support alternative page titles, so simply add a field in your CMS which asks for a meaningful page name, and program your site to add it into the template. As content contributors add content, those page names will be automatically associated with each page, which is a big win.

• Custom Metadata: There are often additional types of data in a CMS that describe content. For example, Digital Web Magazine may want to track the popularity of specific authors across its site. Because authors can belong to multiple content groups, a custom variable can be set on each page which identifies the author and feeds into a specific report. The data has already been defined and the CMS can be extended to include it in the template. As new authors are added, pages are automatically tagged and fed directly into the reports.

By automating the tagging process and integrating it with your content-publishing workflow, you can streamline the reporting process and save significant time and energy along the way.

Onsite searching

If your site has a search engine, it is important to be able to report on user search queries and the number of results for each search. When configuring your search application, make sure the search query and number of results is a visible parameter in the results string. For example, if a user searches for “web analytics” on Digital Web Magazine, the URL looks like:
http://www.digital-web.com/search/?q=web+analytics&x=0&y=0

This enables a report to be configured which measures top site searches. If this is not possible with your search engine, you may need to set the values as custom variables on the results page.

Additional considerations

Other things to keep in mind include:

• File downloads such as PDF and Word documents are not typically tracked with client-side tagging. It may be necessary to add custom code to the links in order to accurately track downloads.

• Flash and AJAX interactivity is not based on unique page views, and can be a measurement black hole. However, it is possible to track them with some additional development work and a little more upfront planning. Evaluate how and why you are using these technologies, and understand the measurement trade-offs.

• E-commerce applications, like content management systems, need to be configured to allow key variables such as product IDs, cost, units, and commerce checkout steps to be tracked correctly. Be sure your developers understand the tracking requirements. Without a properly configured e-commerce application, you will lose valuable data regarding sales and shopping cart abandonment.

• Use common names and values that can link online and offline data. For example, instead of setting an arbitrary product ID number, use the SKU from your inventory system. Set customer identification numbers that match the ones used in your customer relationship management system. This can enable you to merge data and correlate online and offline reports for advanced analysis.

Get More Details At : Digital-web.com

Spread the word: related/bookmark it/readit