Online Marketing Performance » FeedBurner

The long road to FeedBurner and Google Analytics integration

Scott McAndrew — Sat, 26 Dec 2009 20:01:16 +0000

Since Google acquired Feedburner back in 2007 there hasn’t been much good to say about the acquisition of the RSS reporting outfit. Under Google’s watch Feedburner fans have seen more pain than benefit. So, when Google announced (a long awaited) integration between Feedburner and Google Analytics many were excited about the news. Unfortunately, the integration wasn’t what most were hoping for.

No, you’ll still need to log in to FeedBurner to review the majority of the stats that you’d hope to happily find on your Google Analytics Dashboard. The extent of the integration is merely the ability to recognize FeedBurner as a traffic source the same way you would with URL tagging.

That’s it. In fact, this is something that could be done without Google’s “integration” by tagging RSS feed links with Google Analytics’ standard campaign format.

If you’re using Google Analytics and FeedBurner, you may already be seeing FeedBurner showing up as a source in Analytics. If you’re not, it’s just a few clicks away if you know where to look. There’s a post on the AdSense for Feeds blog that details the settings you need to make on FeedBurner.

It seems pretty straightforward: the ability to get both feed and site analytics in one place is what web site owners want. Why Google is taking baby steps is unknown. Hopefully in 2010 we’ll see a (much) deeper level of integration.

Feedburner RSS timeout issue

Scott McAndrew — Sat, 12 Jul 2008 15:51:46 +0000

It appears that Feedburner is currently experiencing some challenges returning RSS feed information. Many blogs I have check this morning are plagued by very poor performance due to this problem.

Performance problems are not limited to viewing RSS feeds; as blog pages rely on Feedburner also, blog visitors are experiencing pages with excessive loading times and/or rendering problems where content is omitted or displayed incorrectly.

As soon as Feedburner addresses the issue, performance on this blog should return to normal. Thank you for your patience.

The long road to FeedBurner and Google Analytics integration

7 days to Google search results—on a new URL?

Scott McAndrew — Tue, 29 Jan 2008 23:54:39 +0000

My group provides Search Engine Optimization and we spend a reasonable amount of experimentation time to see what we can do to sway search engines into our good graces. A good deal of the sites we take under the knife have URLs with a history and web sites to match which are in Google’s index. Achieving relevant Google rankings takes a few weeks on the outside.

For web sites that are hosted on brand new domains it takes more time. If you’re remotely into online marketing, you’re likely aware of the Google Sandbox (also known as the Sandbox Effect). We’re used to seeing a two to four month Google Sandbox period. If you’re not, here’s a layman’s explanation from Wikipedia:

The Sandbox Effect is a theory used to explain certain behaviours observed with the Google search engine. The Sandbox Effect is the theory that websites with newly-registered domains or domains with frequent ownership or nameserver changes are placed in a sandbox (holding area) in the indexes of Google until it is deemed appropriate before a ranking can commence.

The Google Sandbox is a topic of speculation in SEO circles Some say it doesn’t exist at all, that it’s purely a function of mathematics. Whether or not the Google Sandbox is real, or rankings simply don’t come do to algorithmic computation,we generally don’t expect to see Google rankings for a couple of months at least as we’ve observed it to be a good rule of thumb.

Enough back story. Where’s this site that got indexed and ranked on a new domain in less than a week for keyword phrases? You’re looking at it.

I purchased the domain http://www.onlinemarketingperformance.com a few weeks ago. I had the DNS server pointed to SEDO until the middle of last week when I allowed it to redirect itself to GoDaddy and to show an actual web site. After putting a few posts up, a co-worker commented on a couple of posts (which was kind as I only had three to speak of at that time). Which was odd; I hadn’t told anyone about the blog yet.

Today I decided to see if my site was showing up in Google’s results for keyword phrases. I searched on “online marketing performance” and was surprised to see my site ranking on page 4. To be clear, this is only when I search with the phrase in quotations.

I also tried my name “Scott McAndrew” and there I am-the 21st result; top of Page 3 (without the quotation marks).

I then tried a phrase comprised of keywords from a blog post title: “poking beyond facebook” (without the quotations). Page one. Fifth result.

I didn’t do anything special. I’ve heard that web sites can be shown on Google in the few days after launch, but that they then fall off into the Sandbox. I’m going to periodically check Google for the phrases above and see what happens. I’m curious to see if the site gets dropped off the SERPs or if it stays.

In case the Sandbox isn’t a fairy tale; that I continue to have placement in the SERPs; that I happened to have set up my blog more elegantly than I though I did, I’ll post the process I went through.

Related reading about the Google Sandbox elsewhere on the web:

Google Sandbox Defined (Search Engine Roundtable)
Google Sandbox: Frequently Asked Questions (SEO Chat)
How to beat the Google Sandbox (SEOmoz)