Google Analytic Goals and Feedburner Smith

For those of you that know about the plugin Feedburner Smith you know how handy it is turning your Feedburner RSS link into a more friendly (your original) feed link. Last month I finally installed it on this site, and a week later I uninstalled it.

The reason for killing it off was because I was losing a more important part to my site, and that was the knowledge of where my subscribers are coming from. Here is a cool tip on how to track where your subscribers are coming from if you use Google Analytics, and how redirects are not cooperating, aka cool tip/bummer deal.

Track Where Your RSS Subscribers Are Coming From

So your first step is to go to your Google Analytics account. Before going to your dashboard though, you need to click the edit button, and create a new goal.

Looking at the screenshot above you can see the simple settings. Just use “Head Match” for type, use “/whatever” as your destination page (Special Note Here: The page does not have to exist, you will see why in a few), name the goal, and then give it a goal value.

After you have set the goal, you need to set up the link. In this case I am tracking RSS subscribers. Going to anywhere there is a link to your RSS feed or link that you are tracking you just need to add the onclick code like I highlighted in red below.

<a href="http://feeds2.feedburner.com/BestWebImage" title="Subscribe to BWI" rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" onclick="pageTracker._trackPageview('/trackrss');">

Before I added the Feedburner Smith plugin tracking went smoothly for this. Unfortunately the way the plugin works though it was messing everything up. It simply redirects and Gs analytics doesn’t like that at least for tracking. It could be due to the fact that the page does not really exist, but for now this is the only way that I know of on how to track subscribers.

So basically, the cool tip here is the little lesson on how to track subscribers, and the bummer deal is that if you are using Feedburner Smith plugin, forget using it. It’s not going to happen.