How do I tag my site to populate the default RSS reports?
For products:
Webtrends On Demand
Webtrends 9.2a
Webtrends 8.7d
Webtrends 8.5x
Last modified: 9/9/2010
Situation:
You wish to tag your site to populate the RSS Feed Usage, RSS Subscriptions Summary, and Geography by RSS Feeds default custom reports.
Solution:
The default RSS custom reports use the following parameters in order to populate:
Dimensions:
RSS Article Name
WT.rss_a=ARTICLE NAME
RSS Feed Name
WT.rss_f=TITLE OF RSS FEED
Measures:
RSS Article Requests
WT.rss_ev=a
RSS Feed Reads
WT.rss_ev=f
RSS Subscriptions
WT.rss_ev=s
RSS requires various methods of tagging in order to obtain all the necessary data and due to the nature of RSS, some data is limited in what can truly be tracked.
Feed Read:
This is the RSS aggregator checking the RSS feed (reading the XML page) to see if there are any updates to the content. Frequency is set by the aggregator and can vary from a few minutes to several days. Please note that this action is the aggregator software checking for updates, not an actual end user action.
There’s no way to know for sure how often a feed will be requested by a specific aggregator, and there is no industry standard for how often a RSS feed should be checked. For desktop aggregators, the feed refresh rate is usually controlled by the user while web based aggregators usually give publishers the ability to control how often their feed is pinged.This means that any ‘time of hit’ associated with a feed load is likely not an accurate reflection of the actual time a feed is viewed.
Taking this all into account is important to understand and accept that capturing completely accurate, absolute numbers is not possible. Instead reports should be used to look at the RSS trends to evaluate performance over time and the impact of changes rather than focus on the absolute numbers.
Since it is impossible to tag an RSS file with JavaScript and have the logging request come from the client side with this data, the work instead needs to be performed on the server side. It is recommended that the Data Collector API is used then to log activity for your RSS service to the webtrends data collector.
http://product.webtrends.com/dcapi/index.html
Please don't hesitate to speak to your Account Manager for a Professional Services engagement if you need assistance in creating the necessary API's.
Article Request:
This is a request for content, equivalent to a link click on a regular web page. These are direct requests from the user, not an automated function of the aggregator. This is the actual end user reading your content.
“Article Requests” are the numbers of clickthroughs a RSS article or item receives. The tagging of these items is similar to how campaigns are tagged with the following query string parameters manually added to the link URL back to the website content:
WT.rss_f=TITLE OF RSS FEED
WT.rss_a=ARTICLE NAME
WT.rss_ev=a
Example:
http://www.webtrends.com/articles/blog1.aspx?WT.rss_f=TITLE OF RSS FEED&WT.rss_a=ARTICLE NAME&WT.rss_ev=a
Subscribe:
The action that tells the aggregator to notify the user of updates to the feed. Settings for who is subscribed and how often to check the RSS are on the aggregator not the RSS site.
Feed Subscription involves using dcsMultiTrack on the Subscribe event
WT.rss_f=TITLE OF RSS FEED
WT.rss_ev=s
Example:
onclick="dcsMultiTrack('DCS.dcsuri','RSS FEED URL','WT.ti','NAME OF RSS FEED','WT.rss_ev','s','WT.rss_f','NAME OF RSS FEED');"
Please note that this will only be able to track users who used the link on your page. It will not, for example, track users who copied your URL into their own RSS program.
Subscribers:
How many users are receiving updates. The end user subscriber information is kept on the aggregator itself. On the feed end, a subscriber may be a single individual or a portal/web based aggregator representing many users. Due to the fact that some aggregators place the number of subscribers in the Agent field when making requests, it is possible for us to create a report for "Average RSS Feed Subscriptions Reported By Aggregator." Please speak to your Account Manager if you wish to obtain this information.
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