"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

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

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

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

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

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