The Counting of Feed Readers
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I looked a bit to see if this has been addressed elsewhere, but did not find an answer. Are the number of persons who read my feed for any one day, counted also in that day’s hits. If I have 200 hits and 50 persons reading my feed, do I have a total of 250 hits for that day, or are the 50 counted in the views of 200?
Nothing earth-shattering. I’m merely curious…and again, I love WordPress.
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Never gotten a real answer but we believe that feed readers are seperate from the normal count if they pull directly from your feed and not by viewing your site first. Note that folks who view your website and click on your feed lick should count on both lists.
Also note that the 200 hits isn’t actually hits but page views. One persaon coule be generating all of those 200 views you’re looking at. The 50 persons is a count on how many times your feed is pulled, either by person or RSS feed service like Bloglines.
Hope this helps,
-drmike -
Thank you, Dr. Mike. And yes I understand that the page views probably do not represent that number of individual people. Some persons read many pages, or seem to return throughout the day.
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One more question about feeds, if you don’t mind. At the bottom of the feed stats page there are these sentences:
“The chart above shows an estimated number of people who used feed aggregators to read your feed in the previous day. This chart is updated daily at midnight UTC.”
A couple of things I don’t understand:
1.If an estimate is being shown of the people who used aggregators to read my feed during the previous day, why do the numbers climb throughout the day?
2. Usually my highest percentage of feeds are through Bloglines. Today, although I show a bit higher number of feed readers than usual, there is not one from Bloglines. How can that be?
Thank you for your time.
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Best bet would be to send in a feedback and ask Andy directly. He’s the one who worked out the code for the stats.
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Hi,
Is there any way in the near future, through the feed stat we can know who are the visitors, or where the visitor from. -
@lavierose – Best bet would be to send in a feedback and ask Andy directly. He’s the one who worked out the code for the stats and as the program is beta he’s inviting your feedback just like it says on the stats page.
If this function is of such importance to you now that you do not wish to wait you can get a free sitemeter from sitemeter.com install it on your blog and get that information right away. -
Thanks :).
I tried the Sitemeter.com. But this is the something they can’t do “Unfortunately, WordPress.com does not allow you to add the javascript version of Site Meter to your pages. That means you won’t be able to track the original URL from which your visitors came before linking to your site. Other things that Site Meter won’t be able to track about your visitors include timezones, keywords, search engines used, screen resolution, screen depth or javascript version. “
so even though in my feed stat show there were visitors, but in the sitemeter just show a big “0” :D.
But thanks for the suggestion ;).
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lavierose, you missed the instructions for WordPress.com users. :)
Login over there and then hit this link:
http://sitemeter.com/?a=manager&area=htmlcode&page=wordpressdotcom
Remember to assign this link to a category that has posts in it to get it to show up.
If you don’t want to do it that way, then you can also add it to a text widget as per this post.
Hope this helps,
-drmike -
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No problem. We’re had sitemetter folks over here from time to time so I like to see folks using their product. :)
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Sitemeter still doesn’t seem to count feed readers. I may have 90 people read my feed in a day but only 60 show up in sitemeter for that day.
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My feed stats menu option has just disappeared entirely from my dashboard, though it was there earlier to day. Blog stats flash thingie has been wonky for a few days, too. Are these being worked on?
Also, just to clarify (and I’ve seen feed stats stuff in several forums, but can’t remember if this was mentioned): can feed stats represent aggragates instead of individuals? I know the rule of thumb is that the feed stat count = the number of individual human subscribers, but then some members have suggested that some feedreaders may pull a feed once that is then read by several different humans.
However (as I understand it), none of us, incl. wordpress admins, seem to REALLY know for sure what all these blog and feed stats are measuring, or how they are overlapping.
Word?
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The other threads on this subject (which is only a few hours old) are already closing to new comments. The suggestion to use Feedburner does not seem to be a good solution, since it only seems to measure subscribers that use Feedburner’s feed (which for me only seems to represent about 4% of my current subscribers) Does WordPress also plan to retire its own feeds, then? Plus change all the themes (including mine) that are hard-wired to feature it? Inquiring minds need to know, please.
http://www.sitemeter.com (with the wordpress work-around Dr. Mike mentions, above) may be the best answer here. It’s free, with optional premium upgrade. I haven’t had a chance to dig into it yet to see if I’ll lose any of my subscribers, though… appreciate hearing from more experienced users at this point. As will hundreds of other wordpressies, no doubt…
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AFAIK the optional premium upgrade from sitemeter works on javascript and that cannot be added to our blogs.
Also note that wordpress.com feed stats have been “pruned” http://wordpress.com/blog/2007/06/13/retiring-feed-stats/
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This “pruning thing” is crap, I don’t understand why WordPress doesn’t understand how much more important Feed Stats are than “Blog Stats”… someone goes through the trouble and effort of putting you onto their RSS list, then Feed Stats kept track of which of these people read your posts each day and which RSS Account they came from versus some random dude clicks on your page for a second before realizing it’s not porn then off they go… how hard is that to understand?
If, as Matt claims, the “FS” were not being used as regularly as the “BS” it was most likely due to the “BS” being the default Stats Page and the “FS” being described as a “Beta Page” with no serious explanation as to what the “Feed Stats” were and how they were collected. There’s a big hole on my Dashboard now and the fact there seems to have been no explanation as to why WP pulled something I consider to be important is really bugging me… (I’ve left a version of this on two other like-minded forum threads).
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Site Meter is far superior to the WordPress “Blog Stats”… SM gives you a “per Midnight to Midnight” accounting of your stats, plus the Map feature is fascinating and it gives you a day/week/month/year breakdown of Visitors and/or Page hits. All of which makes it strange to me that WordPress would dump the Feed Stats, as that was the one Stat category which seems to be missing from the other “freebie” stats collector sites.
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