It is sometimes the case that from some technologies we are unable to make a call to JavaScript or in some environments even execute JavaScript. One example of this would be RSS feeds where sites content or some other kind of informational stream is downloaded directly from a web server into desktop or third party web based aggregator. We will need to combine a variety of different technologies and reporting approaches to give us encompassing view of RSS utilization, from subscription to consumption.
What we can easily track are clicks on the RSS feed or subscribe link. If a visitor clicks on the link we will want to count that as a subscription using DCSMultiTrack:

This dcsMultiTrack call will populate both of the WebTrends 8.5 + out of the box RSS subscription reports.
But once people have subscribed are they reading the feeds? A “Feed Read” is a request for the RSS file on the server. Since it is impossible to tag an RSS file with JavaScript like we might a web page, the collection of this data will need to be implemented at the server side, sending a logging request directly to the SDC from your own web server. Since we don’t have the WebTrends JavaScript around to build and format this request for us we will have to do it our selves but hopefully is should be something similar to this:

“http://SDC DOMAIN/DCS ID/dcs.gif?dcsdat=POSIX TIME STAMP&dcssip=THE DOMAIN SERVING RSS FEED&dcsuri=PATH OF RSS FEED&dcsua=USER AGENT&dcscfg=1&WT.dl=10&WT.rss_f=TITLE OF RSS FEED&WT.rss_ev=f&WT.ti=TITLE OF RSS FEED&OPTIONAL QUERY STRING

The other standard measure is “Article Requests”; the number of clickthroughs a RSS article or item receives. The tagging of these items is similar to how campaign links are tagged with WT.mc_id. An example of how we might want to format the RSS feed tag link would be:

HTTP://THE ARTICLE URL&WT.rss_f=TITLE OF RSS FEED&WT.rss_a=ARTICLE NAME&WT.rss_ev=a

If we wanted to consider a RSS feed a campaign channel we could also add a WT.mc_id too:

HTTP://THE ARTICLE URL&WT.rss_f=TITLE OF RSS FEED&WT.rss_a=ARTICLE NAME&WT.rss_ev=a&WT.mc_id=CAMPAIGN ID

Moving beyond the out of the box RRS reporting can we track the number of times a post or item is viewed? While most portal based aggregators do not support the viewing of images, web based personal aggregators and desktop based aggregators do. Using an image calls embedded in the items we can get simple item view information similar to the noscript tags used in standard pages. As is the case with tracking feed requests, the image call needed to track this data will need to be generated manually. The format of the generated image request should be something like:

“http://SDC DOMAIN/DCS ID/dcs.gif?dcssip=THE DOMAIN SERVING RSS FEED&dcsuri=PATH OF RSS FEED&dcsua=USER AGENT&dcscfg=1&WT.dl=10&WT.rss_f=TITLE OF RSS FEED&WT.rss_ev=av&WT.ti=TITLE OF RSS FEED&OPTIONAL QUERY STRING”

Note: WT.rss_ev state “av” is a custom parameter, It is not officiall an WebTrends parameter.
It is very important that the image call occur in the body or content of the request. This will ensure that the request will fire when the item is viewed. Putting it in another section of the XML may result in the image not being rendered.
What about tracking activity from RSS aggregators? The neat thing about most portal and web based personal aggregators is that they actually pass the number of subscribers in the agent string.

Here are a few common examples:

Feedfetcher-Google; (+http://www.google.com/feedfetcher.html; 4 subscribers; feed-id=124155534636)

NewsGatorOnline/2.0 (http://www.newsgator.com; 20 subscribers)

Bloglines/2.0 (http://www.bloglines.com; 81 subscribers)

ThePort Web/1.0; subscribers 1LiveJournal.com (webmaster@livejournal.com; for your url/; 1 readers)

YahooFeedSeeker/1.0 (compatible; Mozilla 4.0; MSIE 5.5; http://my.yahoo.com/s/publishers.html; users 2; views 169)

As before, we can pull this data into WebTrends using server side code. This process would occur during the “Tracking Feed Reads” process described above. You would simply need to replace the code under “preprocesses user data to remove junk data at the end of the string” with this more functional code. It is very important that this code IS NOT added to the Article View functionality. Adding it to that code may cause the subscriber numbers to be reported incorrectly.

This of course is all a lot of work for your developers, and would certainly be considered advanced tagging. Are there any alternatives? You could use log files, but you would lose the rich information with tagging that you are able to ascertain about each Feed being accessed and read.

Another alternate to both web logs and server side tagging would be WebTrends partner Atomic Labs. Product; Pion. It use passive network data capture to listen to customer interactions without the need for page tags or server logs. It can strip out information from web documents including RSS feeds as they are requested by visitors and process these into WebTrends parameters in SDC logs. You can find out more about this in Engage 2009 Workgroup Session.

Tags: Engage, RSS

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 11th, 2009 at 7:37 am and is filed under Events, Industry Perspectives, Webtrends Innovations. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.