May 23, 2006
FeedBurner Gets a Memory - Quick Stats Update
The engineers at the FeedBurner Statistics Lab (across the street and down the hill from the FeedBurner Wellness Center) are pleased to present new enhancements to our free StandardStats feed traffic service. And the winners are:
Yesterday's News
Historical subscriber tracking is now live. Want to see how many NewsGator subscribers you have today compared to a week ago? Or MyYahoo? Or iTunes? Yesterday, no way. Today, yes way! The service launches with 5 days' worth of history (starting May 18th) and will work into the future as long you choose to use FeedBurner (remember that we make it easy to leave FeedBurner should you decide you're fed up with all of the free stuff).
The new Subscriber history feature acts much like the stats you know today; just use the date widget at the top of the subscribers page to view your subscriber breakdown from a date in the past. Calculating stats for display should be much faster. By the way, excellent use of the semi-colon in the first sentence of this paragraph (you know, considering we're computer people).
Bonus: The number listed in your subscriber chicklet is now time period synched to the number in the analyze tab. Marvel at the consistency!
Live Hits
Second on the list of new features addresses your need for more immediate data. We now offer a feature called "Live Hits" which you'll find on the Analyze tab below the Subscriber menu item. Wondering how many people have been knocking about your feed just now? Check out this listing of the last 25 hits to your feed displayed by date, time and user agent. This new feature is a running tally that includes everything from subscriber hits to browsers to bots accessing your feed. See an example of what Live Hits looks like for our feed:
Count and be happy.
Comments
Saw this this morning. It's simply orgasmic.
Live stats? Time to feed your inner stats junkie... Good job!
In the words of Del Boy (Only Fools And Horses) - lovely jubbly!
Is it just me, or does anyone else have a problem locating the Subscriber history?
Kingsley -- Sorry for any confusion. To view your historical data, just go to the Analyze tab for your feed, then select the "Subscribers" view. You can click individual days or select a date range (last 7 days, etc) to see historical subscriber detail.
Ah, much clearer, thanks! This is useful.
Did you take down the feature that gives live past-24-hour circulation updates, or simply move it to someplace where I can't see it any more?
If you took it down, it's completely misleading to tout this as an "upgrade." Telling me where my last 25 hits came from is a toy. I can't do anything with that information. What really matters is how my overall circulation is changing from day to day, and you've removed the ability to spot live trends. If I get a spike from iTunes or promotion in some major media, it's useful to me to be able to detect and react to it that day. Without the ability to calculate live circulation I won't even know something happened until the next morning.
I'd like to see that feature restored, if possible. Or at least be up front about what you've done to it, instead of pretending that this "Live Hits" feature is better.
So it looks like you've eliminated the running past 24 hour subscriber statistic?
So while I can see the 25 most recent hits, and I can see the number of subscribers for previous entire calendar days, I can no longer see how many unique subscribers have visited the site in the past 24 hours. Or have you just made that feature harder to find?
Stephen and Steve -
Thanks for the feedback. The old Subscribers view was a temporary picture of what was happening with your feed over a rolling period; now it's a consistent and cross-referenceable view of the data that provides an apples-to-apples, reliable comparison of subscriber trends from day to day. (The ability to go back in time and view historical data has been a frequent request from publishers.) If what really matters is how your overall circulation is changing from day to day, the ability to view historical subscriber stats does just that. Simply click on the previous day to compare data. Apologies we weren't more clear about this in our original post. Also, "Live Hits" is a new feature that was never meant to be a replacement to the 24-hour live subscriber screen.
Traci wrote: "The ability to go back in time and view historical data has been a frequent request from publishers."
True, but what would be even more helpful would be the number of unique subscribers averaged over a longer time, such as a week. For example, how many of the 400 I saw yesterday are the same subscribers as the 378 I saw today? Over a week, do I have just 400 subscribers, or 2,800?
The rolling period stats were helpful for several reasons. Most importantly, they gave me more instant feedback that alerted me to things like some high-profile site linking to my pages.
Any chance we can have a total subscribers count for "all my feeds" ? (save me adding up the totals for 13 feeds every week so I can report on it :) )
Traci:
Also, "Live Hits" is a new feature that was never meant to be a replacement to the 24-hour live subscriber screen.
Great. Now tell me where I can get to the 24-hour live subscriber screen in the new interface, please.
If you've eliminated that feature, then you've significantly downgraded my Feedburner experience.
Yes, great improvement for feedburner, thanks folks. I still look for a more "Live" subscribe analyst that update the subscription count more frequently.
Well, I must say FeedBurner is a great application. Great work guys! Keep it up.
There are WAAAAY more than 3 made-up words on thsi website...
J Bigga
