RSS Subscriber Habits

It’s been 5 months now since I started tracking RSS subscriptions on Google Analytics. I thought I knew what I was going to see based on how I use RSS. I was so very wrong… While my site gets neither a ton of traffic nor a ton of subscribers there’s a reasonable amount of data to look at that surprised me. Now the main caveat here is that I haven’t been tracking the people who subscribe by clicking on the RSS button in the URL bar - only those who click on one of the icons I put in my right nav or at the bottom of posts on individual article pages. It appears that many people subscribe via the URL bar since my subscriptions go up faster than my goal tracking would otherwise indicate.

One surprising thing is that nobody clicks on the big RSS icon in the left nav of my homepage. Not a one, by far the most clicked was the big RSS icon at the bottom of posts. On the flip side, people would click on the social networking icons in the right nav on the homepage but only rarely click on the ones at the bottom of articles. It makes sense, though, that people would make their decision to subscribe right after they finish reading an article - prominence and ease is an important reminder.

Here’s the thing that really surprised me. The vast majority of the RSS subscriptions happen on the first page view of an article. Vast. I had assumed that the typical scenario would be search engine -> article -> homepage and then a subscription or even clicking through to a few more pages. That is, that people would take a look at the site in general before making the decision to subscribe. I couldn’t have been more wrong. People come in to an article and decide at that point to subscribe 95% of the time. I find this counterintuitive where by counterintuitive I mean, not the way I decide to subscribe. What are your RSS habits?

As I pondered that I thought of a couple possibilities. The first that crossed my mind were that they were all coming in from authoritative links from another big web site. While that seemed true for some, my links from Yahoo were the most common starting point. The majority of subs were on pages that didn’t have any links directly to them. One idea down…

Then I thought that perhaps these were repeat visitors who were already familiar with the blog and this was the camel’s back breaking straw, although I wasn’t sure how they’d be entering directly into an article, but I figured i’d check it out. Now, Google Analytics does not give you the best tools to look at this, but I checked out their New vs. Returning page with the Goal Conversion tab. Which showed some interesting data, about 75% of the few social networking clicks I received (in both the right nav and article’s) were from returning visitors. BUT over 90% of the clicks on my RSS feed were from new visitors. Again, surprising, given the 1 predominantly single page view habits of RSS clickers.

The last possibility was that all the nav bar subscribers followed the pattern that I guessed and since I’m not tracking them I have no way to know. But even if that were true, the subs that I do track would still make up a significant portion of the action.

All in all, I would have guessed the opposite, that a new, single page visitor would be more likely to del.icio.us/digg/stumble an article than become a subscriber. That subs would come from return visitors and multi-page sessions. So, it goes to show that no matter how you operate and what you think makes sense, on the web it’s a durn good idea to get some metrics on it. I’m pretty happy with this and when I get a chance, I’ll be modifying my templates to see if I can take advantage of this 411. Have you checked in on your RSS subscriber habits? I wonder if this is particular to my blog or if this is a general truth.

Oh, and wouldn’t you like to subscribe now? and reddit this piece? You know, not for my sake… but for science?? :)

Feb 28th, 2008 · Comments RSS · · · · · Tags: analytics · google · rss