Home > Articles

RSS Works: Hard Metrics to Prove It

Copyright 2005 Rok Hrastnik

Marketers are constantly asking if RSS marketing works and
if this can be proved.

It's time to take a look at some real-life RSS metrics from
real-life marketers. These will show you what kind of
results you can expect to see from RSS.

I first presented this data at the Syndicate Conference in
New York City, the first conference entirely devoted to RSS.

To make a point, well take a look at RSS metrics from 4
different viewpoints, each demonstrating one facet of RSS
marketing and a different way of capturing RSS metrics.
This data combined will give you the answer of whether RSS
marketing is for you, as an addition to e-mail marketing,
or not.

1. CLICK-THROUGH RATES FROM RSS FEED TO SITE: THE RSS
AGGREGATOR SIDE

RSS statistics should be most relevant when coming from
actual RSS aggregators and their vendors, since these
people can measure precisely how their users are actually
using RSS.

Customer Reader [http://www.customreader.com], who just
recently launched a desktop RSS aggregator, which marketers
can brand for themselves and then distribute to their
readers, supplied us with their latest data. This data is
based on 3,500 users of their brandable RSS aggregator and
on the last [two weeks ago] 48 hours of their reader usage.

The most interesting piece of data is the 23% average CTR
(click-through rate) from feed to site within last 48
hours, which proves that RSS works in terms of getting
readers from the outbout message to the site. RSS users are
actually clicking on RSS content!

Now, what is the feed-to-side CTR? It simply means that
23% of the end-users that subscribe to various feeds,
clicked at least once on one of the content items in the
feeds they are subscribed to.

2. CLICK-THROUGH RATES FROM CONTENT ITEM TO SITE: THE RSS
SOLUTION VENDOR SIDE

Considering the different RSS metrics systems and the fact
that no marketing tool whatsoever can be measured 100%
precisely from the outside tracking service side, seeing
stats from RSS solutions vendors is important as well.

On this end, some basic stats were supplied from SimpleFeed
[http://www.simplefeed.com], the providers of one of the
more advanced RSS marketing solutions.

The stats are based on an app. 10,000 end-user sample, 30
day average and 4 months of data.

They are seeing a 6.8% average CTR from content item
[individual content item in an RSS feed] to site and a 150%
[1.5 clicks] average CTR from feed to site within 30 days.

3. SUBSCRIPTIONS AND CLICK-THROUGH RATES: THE
MARKETER/PUBLISHER SIDE

And finally, let's take a look at the stats from the
publisher/marketer point of view.

Lockergnome.com is one of the most popular tech sites on
the internet.

Although they are serving a more tech savvy audience,
Lockergnome is an excellent example of the results you can
ultimately hope to achieve using RSS.

First of all, they are seeing a ration of 5:1 in favor of
the number of RSS subscribers against e-mail subscribers,
and even more interesting, a 500% better clickthrough ratio
with RSS than with e-mail.

4. SEARCH ENGINE VISIBILITY

The BTI Group is a smaller VoIP provider and, through their
high ranking blogsite [http://blog.btigroup.com/], the
proof that RSS works for search engine positioning.

Here are just some of their achievements, as a result of
their RSS marketing activities

a] 120 page-one search results on important industry search
terms
#1 Voip vs traditional phone system
#1 VoIP solution provider
#2 VoIP small business
#2 VoIP architecture
#5 VoIP phone equipment
#6 VoIP benefits
#7 VoIP Small Business costs

b] A 75% increase in traffic to the corporate website

c] BTIs link popularity jumped from 164 in June 2003 to
1312 in December 2004 to 1405 in February 2005

OVERVIEW

These metrics clearly show that RSS works for marketers and
publishers.

This data alone, also considering that RSS clearly gets
100% of your content delivered and actually provides you
with an abundance of new marketing opportunities, such as
podcasting, should be enough to make you do something about
RSS now.

------------------------------

Rok Hrastnik is the author of Unleash the Marketing &
Publishing Power of RSS, acclaimed as the best and most
comprehensive guide to RSS for marketers by leading RSS
experts. The complete guide on RSS for marketers:
http://rss.marketingstudies.net/index.html?src=sa7

More articles by Rok Hrastnik - http://www.submityourarticle.com/articles/Rok-Hrastnik-279/

RSS Feeds for Teachers Can Stop Classroom Management Problems and Streamline Your Time

(Submitted by: Ruth Wells)

It may be a new year, but you are probably still dealing with the same old "kid problems." The bad attitudes, disrespect, peer conflict, lying, school failure or family problems didn't change when you flipped the page on the calendar. Don't ... Read article

RSS Revolution and Definition

(Submitted by: Vinay Rana)

RSS (Really Simple Syndication) is channelizing or syndicating the flow of content from different sources to different target WebPages or websites.It has helped in content providing website to distribute their data across the globe using ... Read article

Displaying RSS Feeds on Your Web Page

(Submitted by: Sanjay Johari)

RSS feeds have made it very convenient to syndicate information from various sources. Most of websites and services that publish fresh content, such as ezines, press release, new agencies, blogs make their content available thru RSS feeds. As new ... Read article

RssToBlog Review

(Submitted by: Tony Guribal)

Here is review of RSStoBlog by an owner of the product The RSStoBlog software is an wonderful piece of automation. Developed by the author to have all blogs updated, it has evolved into a feature packed auto blogger update package. No ... Read article

The Basics of RSS

(Submitted by: Jonathan Coupal)

RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication, and it is a standard, public format designed for sharing headlines and the content of web sites (previously known as the RDF Site Summary). But RSS feeds are not just for news anymore. Almost anything ... Read article

1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 | 27 | 28 | 29 | 30 | 31 | 32 | 33 | 34 | 35 | 36 | 37 | 38 | 39 | 40 | 41 | 42 | 43 | 44 | 45 | 46 | 47 | 48 | 49 | 50 | 51 | 52 | 53 | 54 | 55 | 56 | 57 | 58 | 59 | 60 | 61 | 62 | 63 | 64 | 65 | 66 | 67 | 68 | 69 | 70 | 71 | 72 | 73 | 74 | 75 | 76 | 77 | 78 | 79 | 80 | 81 | 82 | 83 | 84 | 85 | 86 | 87 | 88 | 89 | 90 | 91 | 92