What's Up With That? Vol. 2: Clicks

A publisher wrote in a couple weeks ago and asked, "Your click count and Google Analytics' click count are way off. What's up with that?" And lo, another "What's up with that?" post was born. Welcome to What's Up With That Volume 2: Clicks.

Publishers who are interested in measuring audience engagement through their feed often turn on our clickthrough tracking service (StandardStats users, click "StandardStats" and check the box marked "Item link clicks"; TotalStats users do the same under "TotalStats"). When this service is enabled, we rewrite the clickthrough link so that the initial click request goes through ours servers; we log the request and then forward the browser on to your site.

Publishers with access to advanced web analytics products (Google Analytics, Omniture, to name a few) often have the ability to measure clickthroughs as well, albeit through a different mechanism: these services use the addition of a parameter at the end of the URL - something like www.blog.com/permalink.php?source=rss. That "?source=rss" is how the web analytics platform knows that the click came from the feed.

Theoretically, these two reports should line up. In reality, they rarely do. We've dug into these discrepancies and thought we'd share what we found:

• There's more than one feed. Believe it or not, this is all too common: you publish a feed that runs through us, and you publish one or more other feeds that get picked up by search engines or other feed readers. The result? Some clicks come through us, some clicks go straight to you. To ensure you're seeing a complete picture of your activity in your FeedBurner account, make sure you've redirected your feeds properly. (WordPress users, there's a plugin; TypePad users have one-click integration; other platforms, check out the forum topic that covers many of the popular ones. Your platform not listed? Contact us and we'll give you a hand.)
• The analytics platforms are on different time zones. Yeah, this seems a little goofy. But if we say there are 1,250 clicks on Monday, and Omniture reports 750 on Monday, we've seen cases where the sole explanation for the discrepancy was that our Monday and their Monday started at different hours.
• What's "valid" is in the eye of the service. We've seen several cases where a clickthrough shows up in our logs, and by all accounts it's valid, but is nowhere to be seen for the web stats service. Very often, this is because the web stat service sees the click as invalid. The validity appears to be questioned because the click is not accompanied by a referrer - which would make sense in a web world, but in a feed world, not so much. Any click originating outside a browser (which is to say, any click originating in a stand-alone feed reading application) would show up as having no referrer - but which would be a valid click. Consequently, we'll often see higher click numbers than web analytics platforms.
• Some bots pre-fetch clickthrough links and store the destination URL. One topic we'll cover in a future "What's Up With That?" post is feed-specific bots. There are a surprising (and growing) number of them, and they all behave a bit differently. We filter out bot-specific activity, and in general we see a lot more of these bots than most non-feed-aware services. Consequently, those services might report more clickthroughs because they are not filtering out bot clicks that we recognize. We're always looking for better ways to interpret (or ignore, as the case may be) bot activity, and we work with many of the legitimate services to ensure that their activity is understandable when we see it. As you might imagine, this is a moving target.

One final note on effectively using the clickthrough tracking. When you enable clickthrough tracking and you subscribe to TotalStats, we give you the option of using either a 301 redirect or a 302 redirect. Those numbers correspond to the http code that our server returns to the requesting application/server. A 301 redirect is a permanent redirect, in effect telling the requesting application that the one and only place where the content lives is at the destination URL (i.e., not the click-through URL, but the permalink for the content). A 302 redirect is a temporary redirect, signaling that the destination URL may change at some point. Different publishers have different preferences, so we don't presume to know which approach you will prefer: but whichever you want, you can indicate through the item link clickthrough configuration.