my.45n5.com • Subscribe • Forum • Blogs • Top100 • MoneyLinks • About • Advertise

How to Get Feedburner Stats WITHOUT Using Feedburner On Your Blog

» February 27, 2007 in

Update: The CTO of feedburner says this trick doesn't report accurate results for desktop readers currently but offers a way to improve it (thanks). I also added a creative commons license to the code if you think you can improve it, go for it, just attribute the original!

Major Update 1: WP Plugin: Feedburner Feed Stats

» You can get feedburner subscriber stats without sending a single one of your visitors to feedburner.

» It doesn't require any hacking or exploits, just simply modifying your own rss feed.

» In the following article I'll show you exactly how it's done and how you can start seeing the results instantly!

Why Not Use Feedburner "As Is" For Stats?

Most people have concerns that their entire rss readership is subscribed to a third party and NOT to themselves. If feedburner went out of business tomorrow you would be up a creek.

Feedburner allows your burned feed on their site get indexed and rank in the search engines, which is a major party foul.

Also my feedreader of choice, sharpreader, has a hard time with autodiscovery of feedburner feeds.

How To Get Feedburner Stats Without Using Feedburner On Your Blog

how to

disclaimer: backup any file before modifying it

First the summary of how it's done:

1. Sign up for feedburner and burn your feed.

2. Add code below to your rss feed replacing "yourfeedhere" with your feedburner feed name

Thats it! Your dialy subsribers will take until the next day to update, however your live hits will start showing instantly!

Step By Step of how it's done (with video tutorial):

1. Sign up for feedburner and burn your feed. (that didn't change)

2. Take the new feed name you just created and replace the blue text below with it:

$feedburnerfeed="http://feeds.feedburner.com/yourfeedhere";
$ch = curl_init();
$useragent=$_SERVER[’HTTP_USER_AGENT’];
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_USERAGENT, $useragent);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $feedburnerfeed);
$data = curl_exec($ch);
curl_close($ch);

Code licensing only (modify away just attribute the source):

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License.

3. Copy and paste the code snippet above into your rss feed file, in a php section, and upload to your server.

That's it! Are your eyes glazed over and you still need a bit more help? I made the next video just for you!

Helpful Tip - When you save your modified file save it as a new file name. So if you rss file is called rss.php, save your new file as rss2.php. When you are sure the new file is working correctly you can change it back to the original filename.

Proof of concept

how to

The image on the right is what feedburner says this website's weekly visitors amount to.

However I don't have a single subscriber here using feedburner (check my feed links on the right, none go to feedburner).

And what about that cool subscriber breakdown everybody shows off?

You can have that too ;-) Here's mine:

how to

Pretty dang cool, huh?

Conclusion

I enjoyed discovering and writing about this feedburner trick. I believe this blog post has great appeal and I want the world to know about it.

If you've enjoyed this post please bookmark it, digg it, and share it with your friends. If you mention this feedburner post on your blog I'll include a link back to you below (shoot me an email so I don't miss it).

1. Andy Beard Feedburner Feedback
2. Affiliate Marketing Blogger Feedburner Post
3.Feedburner stats without the burn
4. Feedburner Statistiken ohne Blog Integration
5. New WP Plugin: FeedBurner Feed Stats.
6. Doshy Link Attack! Adwords, Digg, Online Business, Adsense Ebooks and SEO Clinic
.....

Enjoy!

If you like this post then please consider subscribing to my full RSS feed. You can also Subscribe to 45n5 by Email and have new posts sent directly to your inbox.

Matt Coddington says on February 27, 2007

Wow really great post MARK. I may just have to implement this, I like the idea of not relying entirely on FeedBurner for my feed.

45n5 says on February 27, 2007

Thanks Matt, yeah it's really the best of both worlds, total control of your feed, plus feedburner stats ;-)

Not that feedburner stats are even accurate, yours jumped from 666 yesterday to 1145 today?

Matt Coddington says on February 27, 2007

Ah yea that's the Digg effect. But what does it even matter anyway when you can get 283k subscribers in a day?
http://www.netbusinessblog.com/2007/02/22/how-i-got-283k-subscribers/

Andy Beard says on February 27, 2007

This looks like a better solution than the redirects people currently use which is great.

It doesn't solve email subscriptions, but you are using Aweber for that. I just signed up to that version of the feed to take a look.

What needs to be done is to turn this into a plugin if possible and to use a license so people can actually use it ;)

45n5 says on February 27, 2007

283k visits per day is pretty good, I've done better though, with other sites ;-)

I wasn't aware digg could bounce your subscribers up that high in a single day. I'm assuming that comes back down...

45n5 says on February 27, 2007

Thanks for the pointers andy.

"What needs to be done is to turn this into a plugin if possible and to use a license so people can actually use it ;)"

I will look into both of those tomorrow.

Great feedback!

Vlad says on February 27, 2007

Great post Mark as usual! I am really looking forward to the plugin!

Andy Beard says on February 27, 2007

Some more feedback coming in a blog post

Leonard Chen says on February 28, 2007

If i'm already using the feedburner redirect, can i disable it if this method is implemented?

Scott Jangro says on February 28, 2007

Very Dang Cool, Mark.

I'm trying it out now.

What you may not realize Mark, having written your own blog software, is that there are 4 (I think) files in Wordpress to edit. Two for RSS, one for Atom, and one for RDF.

I've added this code to all 4. What this needs is a wordpress plugin to put it everywhere. But I'll not get ahead of myself. Let's see how this works.

off to bump and digg...

Eric Lunt says on February 28, 2007

That's a clever method to use, Mark, but one thing that you should be aware of is that the circulation algorithm that FeedBurner uses also take into account some other attributes of the HTTP request; specifically, the remote ip addresss, the Referer [sic] headers, and the X-Moz header. Since all of the requests will look to FeedBurner like they're coming from your domain, you won't see more than a single subscriber for any desktop client. You likely have many more subscribers than are being reported.

Just wanted to make sure you're aware of that. If that's okay, then congrats on your new way to proxy the feed requests!

Eric Lunt
CTO, FeedBurner

gary says on February 28, 2007

Yeah, good lateral thinking on this one.

There is one good reason to use the proper Feedburner feed though, as I found out. I had to move my blog URL from blogger (urgh) to Wordpress. Fortunately I had feedburner set up in my early blogger days, so it was a piece of cake to log into feedburner and change the feed url from blogger.com/atom.xml (or whatever it was) to the new wordpress one. I think it was pretty painless for those who syndicated my feed.