How to Track Traffic from RSS Feeds Using Google Analytics

“RSS is a family of Web feed formats used to publish frequently updated works such as blog entries, news headlines, audio, and videos in a standardized format. An RSS document (which is called a “feed”, “web feed”, or “channel”) includes full or summarized text, plus metadata such as publishing dates and authorship. Web feeds benefit publishers by letting them syndicate content automatically.” (1)

So for you bloggers and website owners out there, who are using Google Analytics and wish to track your site traffic from RSS or Atom feeds, try the following steps:

1. Identify your template within your blog CMS tool where the RSS or Atom feeds are generated.
2. Use Google’s link builder tool to create the query parameters to attach at the end of your URL defined in the XML file.
   For example: http://www.zoommetrix.com/rss.xml?utm_source=RSS_Feed&utm_medium=RSS&utm_campaign=RSS_Syndication
3. After you set the query parameters into your URL within your xml file, publish or refresh your xml file.
4. If you get an error, you may want to change “&” to “&” so that the browser can render the entity properly.
5. Access your Google Analytics report, and go to Traffic Sources > Campaigns. You should be able to get the traffic data attributing to people who visited your site via RSS or XML feeds.

(1) Reference: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSS_(file_format)