Google Analytics

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.

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