RSS Feeds, how do you measure subscribers and correlate data with analytics?

[adam_knight]

Does anyone any knowledge to share in this area?

Are there any tools out there that can track and measure RSS subscribers? BUT...Not only those that have subscribed to a feed, but also those who open Post X within a feed?

So, suppose someone regularly reads your content through RSS but isn't accessing your site directly. Are there any tools out there that can correlate RSS subscription / article views with your site Analytics?

I ask because Analytics doesn't seem to take into consideration the impact that RSS has on a page; this will obviously impact on core metrics like Unique Visitors. It there a tool that takes into account RSS and bring it under the same roof?

Any ideas?

[zaggernaut]

I m pretty sure there are customised solutions for RSS subscriber analytics. But I use a pretty simple solution thats not perfect but it can be improved-

I use it on our corporate blog. The feed is distributed via Feedburner. So we get the subscriber number stats from there.It tells a hell lotta of other useful data as well. Now to get the traffic stats from open-post data, I tested on a couple of posts using Analytics external link tagging. I just generated links with Google tags on them and used them in the blog posts. That way I can see what traffic is coming from the RSS feed. To make things simpler and less tedious I have tags on category-level rather than for every post. So I know what category is generating more traffic.

I am also exploring better ways of doing this, for example, I would want to know how many readers actually click on the feed from within their reader to open the blog, because this part is still missing from tracking cycle.