For most of you, if you run a blog, RSS viewers are a common goal. It would be nice to know where, how, and why people are finding the RSS feeds from your site. This would fall under what is called a "Goal” in Google Analytics. Setting goals in Google Analytics is a fairly straight forward process, you pick a URL that you want to be your goal page (a lead generation thank you page, check out page, user sign up page, etc.) and anytime a user accesses that page, it counts a goal.
The problem with setting your RSS feeds as a goal, is that the page you are sending users to subscribe does not support the Google Analytics tag. This means that you cannot use that specific page as a goal. The work around for this, is using link tracking that will simulate a pageview when a the link to your RSS feed is clicked. Here I will walk you through not only editing your links, but also setting up your goals in Google Analytics.
1. Setting Up the Goal
I’m assuming at this point you have already have Google Analytics fully installed on your blog \ website. The first thing we will need to is define the goal. Go into and edit your blogs profile settings in Google Analytics
On this page you will the Conversion Goals and Funnel section. This is where you are going to set up your goals. You can configure up to four goals for your site. For the purpose of this, we are going to use two. Let’s start editing the first goal.
This is where we will define our goals. For a complete breakdown on how to use this page, you can check outGoogle’s Conversion University help video (about 8 minutes long). We are going to mark the goal as active and set it to Head Match. The next part is defining the URL. Since we are artificially creating this page, we can name it anything we want. I want with goal/<type>/<location>. Type a name for the goal and optionally set a goal value.
Since I have multiple places that you can sign up for RSS feeds, I set up one for the header and one for the footer. Feel free to set up any additional goals the same way.
2. Editing Your Links
The next step will be adding the tracking to the links to your RSS feed. Remember, we cannot use the feed itself, it will be triggered when they click on the "RSS Feed” button. This does not mean that they followed through and actually subscribed. For those types of numbers, see the "Other Possibilites” section.
To tag an outside link, you will add an onclick event to the anchor tag. See the screen shot for an example.
onclick="javascript:pageTracker._trackPageview('/goal/feed/footer');"
Full Screen Shot, Click to Enlarge
All you need to remember is that the part in the between the single quotes needs to be the same as the Goal URL you set up in Google Analytics.
Other Possibilities
While this solution does not give you a full count of subscribers, it will give you an idea of how many people at least took the first step to subscribing. There are 3rd party feed managers like FeedBurner that would enable you to track how many subscribers you have. Unfortunately, their counts aren’t really the numbers of subscribes you have, but actually is just a report on how many people requested your feed that day
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