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April 12, 2006
How Can Marketers Improve RSS Measurability?
I had an interesting conversation recently via email with a marketer who is using RSS. He's using Web beacons -- tiny 1x1-pixel images also used by email marketers -- to count the number of times a message is viewed, but he's running into two common problems. One is that Web portal feed readers such as Yahoo! and AOL don't support images in RSS feeds. The other is that some RSS readers that do support and display images in feeds, cache the images, making tracking impossible beyond the first view.
He asked if I knew of any solutions for improving RSS measurement. The fact is, first-generation RSS faces the same challenge today as first-generation Web and site analytics did in the late 1990s -- it relies on incoming page requests and attempts to decipher IP address and other indirect information. I believe these methods are reasonably accurate, but they are nowhere near 100-percent accurate.
I advised him to take a look at the emerging new generation of RSS feed systems based on Individualized RSS. Companies like Silverpop, SimpleFeed and Syndicate IQ already have commercial IRSS applications that are worth taking a look at. IRSS works by creating a unique feed for each subscriber (rather than a single feed for all subscribers). With IRSS, pixel tags are individually-named, so they don't get cached. And, even if a feed reader doesn't support images, you can still infer a great deal about behavior because you are able to measure individual click-throughs, which gives you real insight into how subscribers are responding.
For marketers who want to stick with the current RSS technology, companies like FeedBurner and others have invested huge effort into maximizing the measurability of traditional RSS. Since their services are free, you really can't go wrong using them.
But in my opinion, marketers need far more information than they can get with RSS. I believe this will drive an inexorable move toward IRSS over the next five years. Since the consumer experience is identical, it's only a matter of marketers getting their heads around the technology and the slightly higher costs.
Posted by Bill Nussey at April 12, 2006 08:48 AM
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Comments
Hi Bill, this is a thoughtful post and of course raises a bunch of questions. As you might imagine, we at FeedBurner take a dramatically different view, and we would suggest that the individualized feed approach as currently understood is flawed in several ways. Tracking gif cache solutions are straightforward and market proven (parameterized urls, no-cache, etc). From our perspective, there are five specific problems with individualized feeds as currently conceived. 1. Marketers have no mechanism to "re-herd" the feeds when they decide to go in another direction. Since feeds, unlike say dynamically generated web pages, are persistent, you have to conceive of a migration strategy before embarking on any feed management approach and individualized feeds make this problematic. 2. No standard mechanism to prevent public subscription to individualized feeds. Go to any web-based aggregator, search for a feed from a marketer using an individualized feed approach, subscribe to one of the feeds, and voila, no more individualized feed. You can attempt to solve this through authenticated feeds, which we would suggest just replaces one issue with another 3. Aggregators will very quickly realize that they shouldn't poll 10,000 individualized feeds that all contain a union of the same content. They will roll them up whether you like it or not, because it imposes significant polling cost increases on their business from which they derive no benefit. 4. As remixed, filtered, and repurposed aggregations of content become more and more common, marketer messages need to stand out on a post by post basis. Without a common source for the rip/mix/filter bots to poll, how will a marketer/publisher ensure that all of their content is available to be distributed to the widest possible audience? 5. Search. Feeds are persistent; as they become a broader part of the search landscape, individualized feeds as conceived today are problematic. Imagine searching for CNET at Google and getting 9 million results containing all the individual web pages that each different user saw in the last couple days. Doesn't work. Feeds provide search engines with a simple structured content landscape, and individualized feeds put the onus back on the search engine to filter and manage a complete but unduplicated set of publishers/marketer content. We think the answer to these issues lies in a careful approach to parameterized feeds (which we would distinguish from individualized feeds) that makes sense for subscribers, aggregators, mix/filter bots, and of course, search.
Posted by: Dick Costolo at April 12, 2006 03:18 PM
IRSS seems like a scalability nightmare
a unique feed for every subscriber?
there has got to be a better way
Posted by: fred at April 12, 2006 09:15 PM
Bill,
Nooked provides support for both models for marketers, simple tracking - one feed for all subscribers and personalized tracking - a unique feed per subscriber.
Posted by: Padraig McGourty at April 13, 2006 06:40 AM