Socializing your feed with Twitter

Sometimes you reach across the hedgerow to share with your nearby neighbors. Other times, members of the household move away and yet you can't keep from calling to remind them to wear a hat and such because it's chilly out. Today, we're celebrating acquaintances near-and-far by launching the ability to send your feed to Twitter.

FeedBurner has always been about measuring, managing, and monetizing syndicated content. Our hope is that by providing one application in which you can direct your feed in real-time to a number of endpoints, in this case Twitter in addition to the myriad feed readers, aggregators, and search engines that we have always supported, and then following on with providing analytics for measuring exactly how and where your feed gets distributed across social media, you can make better and more informed decisions about how to monetize your content.

Many of our publishers who have tried our Google Analytics feed item link integration have already noticed that their most popular feed items have been shared many times on Twitter.

We're now taking our distribution and analytics a step further by enabling the ability to automatically publish the feed items that meet your criteria to Twitter, using the Google URL shortener at goo.gl.

To get started, go to the Socialize service on FeedBurner's Publicize tab and add the Twitter account to which you would like to post items from your feed. You can take the default settings and click [Save] to start socializing immediately, or use the options we offer to customize exactly which feed items are sent to Twitter and how exactly you would like them to look. The next time you post a new item to your feed it will be sent to Twitter (as always, make sure to ping FeedBurner whenever you update your feed so this process happens as near real-time as possible).

For full details on all Socialize options, see our FeedBurner Help Center topic.

To see the results, take a look at the Twitter account in which you are sending your updates. This blog post, for instance, as well as select blog posts from this and the FeedBurner status blog, will appear from now on at http://twitter.com/feedburner. If Twitter is where you are consuming most of the latest content these days, please follow @feedburner to receive our updates in your favorite Twitter client.

Posted by Steve Olechowski  - Product Manager, on behalf of the Google FeedBurner team

"Afternoon, Frank." "Hey howdy, George."

It's about time these two neighbors got to talking to each other. Most Saturday afternoons you'd find them politely waving as they passed at each other by with their push mowers, tending to their neatly manicured tables, charts, and graphs. It just made sense that the grounds would look that much more complete if they removed a bit of fence between them. And so they've done just that.

If you use either AdSense for feeds or Google FeedBurner to track item clicks and also use Google Analytics, as of today, you will automatically start to see your feed item click analytics show up in Google Analytics with some additional information added to help you understand how distributing your feed with FeedBurner leads to traffic on your site.

Specifically, we will help you classify your links by tagging the Source as "feedburner", the Medium as the channel in which we sent out your feed such as "feed" or "email", and the Content as the actual endpoint application in which the user viewed your feed content such as "Google Reader" or "Yahoo! Mail".  In order to slice your traffic by these endpoints, in the All Traffic Sources view in Google Analytics select the "Ad Content" field in the second column.

In the coming weeks, you will start to see many more distribution endpoints in your reports. The represent ongoing additions to our database of applications that process feeds.

By default, these analytics will show up in the "All Traffic Sources" and "Campaigns" views in Google Analytics. You can filter the results just to only the traffic that comes from Google FeedBurner by filtering on "feedburner" on the All Traffic Sources page or "Feed:" on the campaigns view.  You can also use these sources in the Advanced Segments views.

In this view below, we actually have two separate feeds driving traffic to this blog, and that can  now be tracked easily in one view.

If you have item click tracking enabled, we are now automatically tagging your item URLs with Google Analytics parameters. If you're not using Google Analytics, or for some other reason don't want these parameters in the requests coming to your website, you can turn off Google Analytics tracking on the "Configure Stats" page on the Analyze tab at http://feedburner.google.com.  If you don't have item click tracking enabled, this is also the perfect time to turn it on, which can be done on this same page.

For instance, if you would rather see the detail of where your feeds are read directly, you can add ${distributionEndpoint} as the medium, and then you will get views that look something like this.

Again this will happen automatically except in one specific case:  if you are already tagging your feed item URLs with Google Analtyics tags such as "utm_source" and "utm_medium" - we have disabled this feature and you will have to turn it on manually by selecting "Track clicks as a traffic source in Google Analytics."   Note that if you do this, we will replace any existing "utm_" tags that may be in your permalinks with the values generated from FeedBurner.

In the coming weeks, we will be releasing more features in Google FeedBurner that take advantage of this functionality, so we highly recommend that you register and set up your site with Google Analytics if you haven't done so already.

Posted by Steve Olechowski on behalf of the Google FeedBurner team

AdSense policy clarification on using AdSense for feeds and AdSense for content

This is just a quick clarification on AdSense for feeds as it relates to the AdSense for Content specific policy of only allowing three ad units and three link units per page.

Many publishers have asked the question "Since feed items often get displayed with many feed items on a single web page, can using AdSense for feeds jeopardize the status of my AdSense account?"

The answer is no. Having three ad units per page is a product specific policy for AdSense for content. Product specific policies can be read about here.

In essence, the variable ways in which feed items are displayed are controlled and optimized automatically by the AdSense for feeds application and the choices you make as a publisher in your AdSense account when configuring your AdSense for feeds ad units. This means we may automatically suppress ad impressions when we detect there are too many feed ad units being displayed, resize ads based on the size and length of your content, and adjust the ads that are displayed based on the device in which the feed is being read.

Posted by Steve Olechowski - Product Manager, AdSense for feeds

AdSense for feeds now available directly in Blogger

One of the things our publishers have always asked for are ways to make it even easer to configure their blogs to work with FeedBurner and AdSense for Feeds. We're happy to announce that Blogger users, with just a few clicks, are able to do both at the same time.

Yes, this year for Halloween, AdSense for feeds is putting on a Blogger costume and allowing all Blogger publishers to easily monetize your RSS and Atom feeds directly from the Blogger interface, in the same way you set up AdSense on your blog beforehand.

To set this up, go to Blogger and select the blog you wish to monetize on your Blogger Dashboard, and select "Monetize." This will give you some basic options for configuring ads, and if you already have connected your Blogger feed to FeedBurner, will confirm that the proper feed is being configured. AdSense for feeds will automatically pick the right ad sizes for your users, content, and end medium.



After setup, you will be able to view your AdSense reports (including feed revenue) directly from the Blogger Dashboard, as well as from your AdSense account. Additional feed management options for your feed and feed analytics will be available from http://feedburner.google.com.

Posted by Steve Olechowski on behalf of the AdSense for feeds and Blogger teams

A small yet noteworthy change to our item stats link serving

FeedBurner has been busy analyzing, publicizing, optimizing and monetizing your feeds since 2004, and in that time, we've seen our fair share of feed traffic. In fact, we see billions of hits from feed traffic per week, and we watch this data carefully for trends and opportunities to improve what we do in making sure your feed content is delivered as quickly as possible, as accurately as possible, no matter what its destination might be.

Today we are making an improvement that we think will serve our publishers better by making our service more compatible with search engines that crawl feeds.

When we started the service, one thing we were not sure of at the time was how the feed reading ecosystem would treat the links we rewrite in order to give you statistics on how many people click on your feed items.

For instance, on the previous post in this blog, we change the link in the feed item for "FeedBurner Terms of Service Update" from

http://adsenseforfeeds.blogspot.com/2009/08/feedburner-terms-of-service-update.html

to

http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/blogspot/MQiv/~3/Z8Es5QuvgEI/feedburner-terms-of-service-update.html

which sends the browser to that original URL, but allows us to first track the click.

As a technical detail, we rewrote these links with a code of "302 Temporary Redirect" which tells the browser or consuming service that the redirect is not permanent, and thus it would need to be read every time.

As of today we are changing this to be a "301 Permanent Redirect" because we've looked at the traffic enough to tell that there some benefit to changing this to a "301 Permanent Redirect" - in that some search engines that index the feeds themselves will consider these to be additional links that should be used in determining the popularity of your site. This is the same way that "URL shortener" services send traffic and get treated by search engines, so we feel that this is consistent with the way that content is distributed today. This update should not change the number of clicks that come to your site from your feed nor should it significantly affect the number of clicks FeedBurner tracks for you.

What do you need to do? Nothin'. Nada. Just keep burning your feeds from FeedBurner or your AdSense account in AdSense for feeds, and we will keep working hard to ensure your content is as accessible as possible – now, hopefully even more so.

Posted by Steve Olechowski - Product Manager, AdSense for feeds and FeedBurner

FeedBurner Terms of Service Update

As a natural conclusion to the process of migrating feedburner.com accounts to Google Accounts as previously described here, we have decided to sunset the legacy Feedburner Terms of Service. The Google Terms of Service will be the terms that apply to your use of Feedburner. These Google Terms of Service are the same terms that apply to many other Google products and services, including your Google Account.

As a reminder, the advertising portions of the service are now covered by the AdSense Terms and Conditions and the accompanying Google AdSense Program Policies.

Posted by Steve Olechowski - Product Manager, AdSense for feeds and FeedBurner

Category Filtering beta now available for AdSense for feeds English-language ads

Like we announced on the more general Inside AdSense blog a couple weeks ago, we have extended our category filtering beta to English-language ads on the AdSense network, which we are happy to announce includes ads that appear in AdSense for feeds.

This feature allows to you filter ads in up to five categories such as Dating, Drugs and Supplements, Weight Loss, and Get Rich Quick. Your filters will be applied to English-language ads, no matter how they were targeted.

To have these settings take effect for your feeds, from Ad Review Center, make sure you select a Client-ID that starts with ca-feed-pub. Note that this allows you to select different categories for your feed than for your site, but also means you will need to select filters for both your feed and your site in order for filters to be applied to both these content types.


To see whether category filtering has been enabled for your location, sign in and visit the Ad Review Center, located under the 'AdSense Setup' tab. We're working on expanding this beta to additional languages and countries, and will be sure to announce any updates here on the blog. If you'd like to learn more about category filtering, please visit our Help Center.

Posted by Steve Olechowski - Product Manager, AdSense for feeds

What's all the hubbub about PubSubHubbub?

One of the questions we get from publishers most often is "How do I make sure updates to my feed are delivered to feed readers as fast as possible?" We know this is important to our publishers' businesses and we are constantly making improvements to our back-end systems to minimize the time from when you publish a post to when it appears to subscribers in feed readers.

Recently there have been a lot of developments around the so-called "real-time" web. The promise of the real-time web is distributing new information as quickly as possible. This encourages users to engage in more active participation online and makes the web more dynamic than ever before. However, so far the real-time web has not been easily accessible by feed publishers using their existing infrastructure.

Today we're happy to announce initial support in FeedBurner for the PubSubHubbub protocol. 'Hubbub is an open specification in draft for web-scale publish and subscribe. The protocol can be used to transform any existing Atom and RSS feed on the web into a real-time stream. Best of all, it's open, free, and decentralized like the rest of what makes the web so great: No single organization controls the protocol or how it's used.

As of right now, burned feeds with the PingShot service enabled are automatically enhanced with the PubSubHubbub protocol. We'll add the required discovery elements to these feeds and notify a Google-run Hub, running on App Engine, of publish events. We also convert any pings we receive into 'Hubbub events. That means for many of our publishers out there, your existing feeds are available as real-time streams right now. Like, immediately. This very moment.

If you are a publisher and are not already using our PingShot service, turning it on is easy. From feedburner.google.com, visit the Publicize tab for your feed, select PingShot, and click the [Activate] button at the bottom of the page. From your AdSense account, go to Manage Ads, then click View Feed Stats link, and do the same thing. That's it.



If you manage a service that would like to receive updates to the millions of FeedBurner feeds that use this service as soon as possible, or just want to know more about the PubSubHubub protocol, we encourage you to check out our project on Google Code. There are open-source clients for Python, Perl, PHP, Ruby, and WordPress. We have an open-source reference implementation of a Hub built on Google App Engine. And there are other Hub implementations built and run by other companies. Please let us know what you think in the PubSubHubub Google Group!

Posted by Steve Olechowski, on behalf of the FeedBurner Team

Happiness is more subject in your subject line.

If a certain lack of variety has weighed on the format of your day-to-day, feed-to-email deliveries, things are looking up at last. Recent advances in dollar-sign technology have brought some strange and fascinating new capabilities to the Email Branding section of FeedBurner's Email Subscriptions feature. Read on, ostensibly for the many useful pictures and descriptions, but really for the danger and excitement only a new checkbox can bring.

First, sign in to your Google Account on FeedBurner and then click your feed's title, then Publicize > Email Subscriptions > Email Branding.



Always want to feature the title of the latest post in your subject line? Just put ${latestItemTitle} in the Email Subject/Title textbox:



Do you often have more than one post per day? You can help your readers uncover exactly how many new missives you've got planned for them in each update. Check the "Change Subject…" box and reveal a secondary subject line to use when 2 or more feed posts are delivered in a single email.

Remember, good subject lines command attention in crowded inboxes.

Behold! The mythical "almost empty" inbox. But in this case, the most recent post's subject line, thanks to ${latestItemTitle}, is right in this FeedBurner-delivered email, shining through.

Have fun with this new feature, but please note that ${pithyRetort}, ${iambicPentameter}, and ${heartfeltApology} are not yet supported.

Posted by Paul Darga and Matt Shobe, FeedBurner Team

Be it declared, a map for every feed!

One of the most compelling reasons that publishers choose FeedBurner is that it gives them the tools to record and analyze how many users are consuming their content. Late last week, we launched an enhancement to our item statistics that enables publishers to get a bit more information about those users. Similar to the feature by the same name in Google Analytics, the "Map Overlay" page provides a breakdown of the previous day's item statistics from a geographic perspective.

For feeds with item stats enabled, clicking on the "Map Overlay" item from feedburner.google.com will bring you the page. From your AdSense account, click on Manage Ads and then on "View Feed Stats" for the feed whose map you wish to view.

At the top, you'll find a world map visualization that shows countries with more item views as more intense shades of green.

Hovering over a country shows the name of the country and the exact number of item views.

Below the map is a table, which lists the top 25 countries by number of item views.

Hopefully, you will be able to use these data to better tailor content to your readership, and target lackluster markets. If you are one of our publishers who sells your own ads in feeds using Google Ad Manager, this will help you better target your subscribers. Or, just reveling in the world-wide reach of a feed is pretty satisfying too.

And remember, it's important that you follow our instructions to make sure you are directing all your traffic to FeedBurner.

Posted by Greg Kick, FeedBurner Engineering Team

Redirecting your feed to maximize revenue potential

One of the most popular (and recurring) questions our publishers ask is, "How do I maximize revenue for AdSense for feeds and ensure my subscriber stats are as accurate as possible?" Some of you can recite the answers to these questions backwards and forwards (though we find typing it backwards is quite difficult, so we'll leave you to say that aloud). But for our many new publishers that are just tuning in, here's the recap.


Just setting up AdSense for feeds ad units in your AdSense account is not enough to start seeing traffic and revenue to your feeds. It's critical that 100% of your feed traffic be directed to the feed(s) you created in AdSense for feeds or your FeedBurner account. Luckily, this is fairly easy to do via two standard methods.

1. Redirect your original feed. This is the recommended option for all publishers, but especially if you have an already established blog or feed that already has subscribers. This option ensures that all traffic gets funneled to the version that has both advertising and subscriber tracking enabled. We've detailed this process in this Help Center entry.
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   An added bonus: a plugin for self-hosted WordPress installations and feed-specific features within Blogger and TypePad make redirection much easier on these two publishing platforms.
   
   


2. Promote your feeds.feedburner.com feed. This is recommended only in the cases where you are setting up a new blog, or have an existing blog or feed that has no traffic. For example, if your feed is found at http://feeds.feedburner.com/toastforbreakfast, you would change your blog template to link only to this version of the feed. Note you have to make sure to change it not only where you promote your feed directly, but also everywhere you have feed autodiscovery links in your template. (One other place to keep in mind: BrowserFriendly.)
   

Hopefully, this reminder will help everyone get on firm ground with how to maximize traffic to their feed and revenue from it, too. In future posts, we will be covering how to increase traffic and subscribers to your feed, so hang on to your hat!


Posted by Steve Olechowski - Product Manager, AdSense for feeds

New features for advertisers targeting feeds

Along with the clarification regarding the doubleclick.net domain we posted a few weeks ago over at Inside AdSense, we thought we would mention that we have made similar changes to the AdSense for feeds ad tags that are being placed in feeds. By changing our ad serving to the doubleclick.net domain, we are now allowing advertisers to more easily create campaigns that span all media platform types on the Google Content Network, including sites, feeds, and mobile.

In addition to being able to target feeds with Placement Targeting and Contextual Targeting, which have always been supported, this change will soon allow advertisers to target feed users using Interest Based Advertising across both sites and feeds.

By making it easier for advertisers to buy ads in your feeds, and by supporting the exact same features and ad formats that are accepted on websites, the competition for your ad space should increase to help ensure that you're maximizing your earnings potential.

Posted by Steve Olechowski - Product Manager, AdSense for feeds

Universal Exports, at your service

As feed consumption continues to grow, many or our publishers are adding more and more feeds to their Google accounts, and wishing to analyze, publicize, and monetize those feeds through the combination of AdSense for feeds and FeedBurner. Because of this trend, one of the most frequent questions we receive is "How do I export stats for all my feeds at once?"

As of today, you can now export your subscriber, reach, hits, item click-throughs, podcast downloads, and item views directly from the FeedBurner application on the My Feeds page. You are then at your leisure to slice, dice, add, subtract, and even multiply and divide your stats however you may wish.

As always, aggregate revenue, impressions, and clicks, and eCPM can be downloaded from your AdSense account or Google Ad Manager account (if you have been enabled to sell your own direct ads in feeds through Google Ad Manager) on the Reports tabs.

Also, as a reminder - if you wish to export feed subscriber statistics in timeframes other than those provided, you can do that through the FeedBurner Awareness API.

Posted by Steve Olechowski, Google Product Managment

Feed Stats Processing Caught Up

Over the last week, and as reported in the FeedBurner status blog , we experienced a technical issue that caused us to report reduced subscribers from Google Feedfetcher in your feed analytics at FeedBurner and AdSense.

Our engineers have resolved the issue, and been able to rebuild stats from our logs such that the totals should now be correct. Please note that in the past, we were not able to correct historical statistical anomalies, but are now able to do so, always using the actual traffic data.

No data was lost during this process, nor were any subscribers actually unsubscribed from your feed. All feed content was delivered to all subscribers who wished to view the content, regardless of the numbers reported. Ad impression reporting and revenue were unaffected by these subscriber reporting issues.

We apologize for the inconvenience and appreciate your patience as we continue to merge our systems with other Google systems behind the scenes.



Posted by Steve Olechowski, Google Product Management

An important reminder for our MyBrand users

As we detailed in our previous installment, More details on moving to a Google account, if you used the MyBrand service at feedburner.com — our service that allows you to use a custom domain with your feed — you must move to a Google account and update your DNS CNAME records by March 16, 2009, or else your MyBrand URLs will return a 404 "page not found" error.

It's important to note that it is not enough to just sign in with a Google account and request to move your account if you use MyBrand. Even if your MyBrand-ed URLs have continued to work after you have completed your move, they will cease to work on March 16, 2009 if you have not changed your DNS CNAME.

If you plan to continue to use MyBrand, you can find detailed instructions for changing your CNAME when you are signed into FeedBurner in the My Account > MyBrand section. If you haven't already moved from feedburner.com to a Google Account, please sign in to your account and follow the guided steps to complete this move. Here's a quick preview of those steps (click to zoom in):

(In the image above, you'll see the phrase {YOUR_CODE} in the instructions. This is replaced by an address that is specific to your Google Account available on the aforementioned MyBrand page; you need to use that address to update MyBrand correctly.)

If you have any questions about this transfer process, please refer to the FeedBurner Help Center entry “Transferring FeedBurner Accounts to Google Accounts FAQ” for additional details.

Ad Review Center is now available for Feeds

Many of you have asked for a way to preview ads before they appear in your feed posts. That feature is now available.

The Ad Review Center (ARC) will give you more transparency and control by enabling you to approve or disapprove placement targeted ad creatives before they appear in your posts.

To get started with this tool, please login to your AdSense account. You will find ARC in the ‘Competitive Ad Filter’ section located under the ‘AdSense Setup’ tab. If you are using your AdSense account for other products- content, mobile, or video- please make sure to select the Client-ID starting with ca-feed-pub.

In order to maximize your revenue, we suggest that you keep the default setting to, ‘Run ads immediately.’ This will allow ads to run without delay while still allowing you to login and review the ads at a later time. By selecting the ‘Hold ads’ option, you could potentially decrease your revenue. This option will hold ads from displaying for 24 hours, thus limiting the number of advertisers' driving up your auction price.

You will then have the ability to approve or block a specific ad or advertiser in general. These settings can be changed at any time. Please keep in mind that blocking ads will remove them from the auction and could impact your revenue.

For more information about using the Ad Review Center, please visit our Help Center.

Posted by Barbara Bochner, Google Publisher Solutions Team

More details on moving to a Google Account

Many of you have already moved from a feedburner.com account to a Google Account. For those who have not yet made the move, there seems to be some confusion on the process and exactly what will happen, or not happen, by certain dates. We want this post to help clear up any confusion.

• The FeedBurner functionality of analyzing, optimizing, publicizing, and monetizing your feeds is not being shut down or reduced in any way. We have made some strategic decisions to remove some of our functionality that is not directly relevant to managing feeds for reasons we hope will become apparent over time. Names may change, things may move around, but in general our plan is to provide a lot more functionality that makes sense in 2009, and beyond, for all publishers. Learn more here.



• On February 28th, if you have not moved your feeds to a Google Account, the traffic to your feeds will not be cut off or terminated, but you will not be able to view or manage your feeds until you have moved to a Google Account, unless you use MyBrand. Technically, this means that all traffic will now be served out of our Google data centers, and there will still be a way to move your account that will be in place indefinitely.



• If you used MyBrand at www.feedburner.com, you absolutely must move to a Google account and update your DNS CNAME records by March 16, 2009, or else your MyBrand URLs will return a 404 error. If you use MyBrand and have not moved, you should have already received an email from us with detailed instructions. If, for some reason, you have changed the email address associated with your FeedBurner account, you will receive another message once you have finished the move process to the email address associated with your Google Account.

From a features perspective, this means the work to transition publishers to Google will be complete, and we plan to focus all of our resources on building new and exciting publisher tools that are integrated with other Google products, and to continue improving the monetization potential of AdSense for feeds. We can't wait for you to see some of the things we have in store, but if for some reason you do not want to migrate to a Google account, you can still take your feeds with you.

Posted by Steve Olechowski and Matt Shobe, on behalf of the AdSense for Feeds/FeedBurner Team

Intro to Feed Placements

In times like these, we know that generating as much revenue as possible is on many publishers' minds. This will be the first of many posts that will hope to explain how to better configure AdSense for feeds to help maximize revenue.

Before going into specifibs though, it's important to understand a couple important differences in how your subscribers are different from visitors on your website.  If you use an analytics package for your site such as Google Analytics, most publishers will see that a large amount of their traffic comes from web searches.  Many of these visitors may have been searching for a certain item, such as one of those blankets with sleeves and a hood - let's call it a shanket.  You happen to have written about how much you love your shanket, and let's face it, you know how to write with the best of them, so your page ranks high in search results.  That visitor may see an ad for a shanket next to your search result but wants to know more.  So he or she clicks and reads your post, which seals the deal on this visitor needing a new shanket.  You use AdSense for content, which includes ads for shankets that are matched contextually; the visitor clicks; a shanket is sold; and you earn revenue in the process.

Your feed subscribers, however, very rarely, if at all, get to your content from a web search.  On the contrary, they subscribe to your blog because you write entertaining musings about your family life, and occasionally also write about some of the wonderful products you have come across, such as your shanket.

Because of this, the types of advertisers that run campaigns targeted at your feeds are not necessarily the same advertisers that are targeting search users.  Instead of targeting keywords that match a search, advertisers wishing to use feed subscribers target placements in the Google Content Network.

How do you ensure that your placements are exposed effectively in the Google Content Network?

That's the easy part.  When setting up new feeds on the AdSense Setup tab, make sure you leave the box that says "Create a channel that allows advertisers to target the selected feed."  If you are creating a new channel that aggregates all of your feeds or subsets of your feeds that you would like to show to advertisers (highly recommended), make sure by selecting the "Show this channel to advertisers as an ad placement."

In a week or so, these placements will show up in AdWords and some of the other tools used by Google advertisers to target the content network.

Stay tuned for the next installment on Advanced Feed Placement optimization.

Posted by Steve Olechowski - Product Manager, AdSense for feeds

The 411 on the 502

As many of you know, since becoming a part of Google in June of 2007, the FeedBurner team has been hard at work transforming FeedBurner into a service that uses the same underlying architecture as many other Google applications, running in the same high-volume datacenters. As a team, we chose this path for one reason: our highest priority is making sure your feed is served as fast as possible after you update your content, and is as close as technically possible to being available 100% of the time.

As many of you also know, a month ago we opened up ability for all AdSense publishers to move to this new platform, and just a few days ago made this move available to all FeedBurner publishers. What many of you do not know is that we have been carefully moving publishers for about six months now, looking hard at traffic patterns, debugging issues with these account transfers with publishers and their hosting and service providers, and working with many of our partners (including many other teams at Google) who run feed aggregation platforms to ensure feeds from this new platform are polled and distributed as fast and reliably as possible. (One example: we moved over 100 external Google blogs and their respective FeedBurner feeds over to the new platform as soon as we could; charity (and bug-fixing) begins at home!)

We are very aware of our responsibility to the RSS ecosystem. We are aware we host and provide service to not only some of the largest publishers, but also the feed for your site, the feeds that you rely on for mission-critical news and information, and even some feeds government provides to distribute information on a timely basis to their citizens. We know that many of you run businesses that critically depend on your feed being delivered quickly and reliably, and thus have been working with many of you to ensure that these feeds are delivered in tandem with a monetization solution that allows you to continue business as we go through this transition. FeedBurner has the privilege of serving millions of feeds globally that represent an incredibly wide spectrum of content.

It is this scale however, that makes our transition to Google's platform technically complex, and as we have started to open up account transfers to all users, it has also amplified the permutations of publisher web server configs, service providers, feed readers, search engines, and so on, and so on. We want to ensure that the time we spend tackling this technical complexity is not mistaken for lack of urgency, concern, or priority.

Just as an example, we are aware and have been working on a known issue of returning a "502 Error" or "503 Error" when checking for updates after certain feeds are migrated. This is a very general error message, representing a number of underlying issues, but in many cases it is a service provider throttling or disallowing traffic from Google. Although we came across many of these issues during our testing phase, in reality we knew a lot of these challenges would not fully surface until we released at scale, which we now have and are dealing with as high priority issues within Google.

To help communicate these issues and resolutions much more effectively, we have created a new blog and feed that you can subscribe to during this transition period. We plan to keep these around as long as necessary. We may also add features to the site that allow you to report your own feed issue details.

The extended team — including both original team members of FeedBurner, newer team members that joined us since we've been at Google, and the rest of Google — is excited about our future on this new integrated-with-Google platform that all publishers will be on at the conclusion of this account transfer process. We are excited because we see the potential for scale and innovation on this platform that will make for a true next generation feed management solution. Most of all, however, we are excited about getting publishers excited for these possibilities as we reveal what we have in store.

Posted by Steve Olechowski - Product Manager, AdSense for feeds

Los colores bonitos, or how I learned to stop worrying and compare multiple feed metrics.

If you've been knocking about within FeedBurner using your Google Account, you may have noticed that the original "french fry" chart from the Analyze tab of the original feedburner.com is no more. This venerable bar chart, with its green picket fence of subscriber trend results, has been the first stop for many publishers when checking their feed analytics for years. In its place is new green-ness (and blue-ness) that communicates three times as much information in the same space, and sets the stage for more interesting reporting in the future. Here's a snapshot:



This 30-day view now offers the following information:

• Daily subscriber totals (in green)


• Daily reach totals (in blue)


• The relationship between these two numbers over time

You can move the mouse over any day in the chart and see that day's specific totals for subscribers and reach, too. (Note that reach and subscribers are plotted with different y-axes: subscribers on left, reach on right).

The relationship between these numbers is the kicker:

• Understanding that reach means people taking action by viewing or clicking on items in your feed helps you understand how engaged your audience is.
  
  
• The more often you post (especially with full text), the more often people are likely to view your current (and previous) updates, and even click-through to your site for related information.


• Note the blue spikes in reach above; these are centered around new posts. Steady subscriber growth occurred as this site promoted and redirected 100% of its original feed traffic to its feed.

Don't forget to click the "See more about your subscribers" link below the main chart to view a detailed breakdown of your subscriber traffic:



Comparing this chart, day by day, can help you spot where subscribers are coming from (and from what source they have gone missing, should there be a sudden drop).

While we're on the topic: make sure you can actually get the reach statistic — meaning, make sure you turn on item-level stats for your feed! They're used to help calculate reach. Visit the Analyze tab, look for the "Configure Stats" option, and make sure the boxes shown below are checked:



(You can, of course, check "downloads," too, if you're a podcaster). As a reminder: to view all feed stats' reports and options, either click the "View Feed Stats" next to your feed's ad unit listing in the AdSense Manage Ads section, or sign into feedburner.google.com and click on your feed's title on My Feeds.

— Jessie Chavez, Software Engineer, and Matt Shobe, User Experience Designer, AdSense for feeds

Additions and Attractions for Our Feeds-by-Email Service

FeedBurner's email service began delivering updates in April, 2006. The launch was just weeks after scientists determined email and feeds could be safely combined in a laboratory setting. Our public service has since delivered millions of messages on behalf of thousands of publishers, making sure that publishers who want to get the word out can reach the broadest audience possible — including many site visitors who don't already embrace feeds (or feed readers, like Google Reader), but who trust their email inboxes to be the best way to have content that matters most delivered to them.

As part of our move to Google infrastructure, FeedBurner has added some new features for email publishers. Most of these are of the under-the-hood variety, but a new set of subscriber list management features will be especially beneficial for publishers with dozens, hundreds, and even thousands of existing email subscribers. Here are features live today for all feeds managed through a Google account:

• Added reliability and delivery scale, thanks to Google infrastructure. The same systems that handle Gmail and other, large-scale public email communications traffic now deliver FeedBurner email subscriptions, too.
  


• Robust subscriber list search and pagination. Instead of loading your entire subscriber list, which is too much for some browsers to handle if that list is really big, the new service displays just the 150 most recent subscribers. You can search for specific addresses or general domains (e.g., "hotmail.com" will return a list and total count of your subscribers with "hotmail.com" in their addresses.) This list is now paginated to allow you to scroll through its contents easily.
  


• Complete subscriber list export. Want to view the whole shebang offline? Download a CSV-formatted text file of your entire subscriber list.

These new features are in addition to FeedBurner's classic email capabilities. As always, you may:

• Customize delivery time frame and time zone
• Write your own welcome/activation email text
• Choose from multiple custom font, size, and color combinations
  
• Incorporate a custom graphic logo in your HTML message header
  

Also, new subscribers are still required to confirm their requests (to minimize potential abuse).

Want to use the free email delivery service with your feed? Using the latest improvements to email requires moving your existing feedburner.com account to Google (if you haven't done so already). If you use AdSense, any feeds you set up to use AdSense for feeds will also include ads in emails delivered with this service. Sign in to your AdSense account, click AdSense Setup, then Manage Ads, and then locate an AdSense for feeds unit you have created. Click the "View Feed Stats" link next to this unit to reach your feed's Analyze page. Click the Publicize tab, then Email Subscriptions to view and set up service options. Email subscriptions will be delivered, using your settings, starting with your feed's next update. (If your Google account is already set up to use FeedBurner, you can also get to the "Email Subscriptions" service setup area by signing directly in to feedburner.google.com, clicking your feed's title on My Feeds, and then visiting Publicize > Email Subscriptions.)

Posted by Matt Shobe, User Experience Designer, AdSense for Feeds