Tracking RSS Feed Click-Throughs

You can track click-throughs from an RSS feed to linked items by means of third-party analytics tools. To do this you insert a hyperlink to an RSS feed in a web page, and select the clickthrough tracking option in the Hyperlink dialog.

Note: WebTrends is specifically supported and recommended, but other web analytics packages will also work.

Suppose you have an RSS feed item with the link value:

http://www.domain.com/RSS_item.html

Without click-through tracking, the RSS feed's <link> tag will contain precisely this URL, and subscribers will be sent here directly from their RSS feed reader. Your analytics tool will register the page visit for the URL, but not how the visitor arrived on the page.

With click-through tracking, an intermediary redirect page is created for all item links in the RSS feed. The intermediary page's URL (also its title) is something like this:

http://www.domain.com/system/rss/clickthrough.jsp?feedTag={title of RSS Feed}&subsiteID={ID}&url=http://www.domain.com/RSS_item.html

Feed subscribers are routed through the intermediary page and then to the URL of the item in the RSS feed. In its tracking report, your analytics tool registers details of the intermediary page such as its title -- which contains the title of your RSS feed. From this, you can identify the specific RSS feeds that are directing traffic to your site content.