How Accurate Are Feedburner’s Stats?
I play pretty close attention to my Feedburner stats, even more so since I was invited to join the FeedBurner Ad Network (FAN) a few months ago which is improving every month and helping to reduce my reliance on Adsense.
I like looking at my feedburner subscription count as it provides a very quick snapshot of how my site is doing. That’s why I display the number on my site. It’s not there so that I can show off my feed count, it’s there so I can see it everytime I check the site.
However, over the last week or so I’ve been questioning how accurate these stats are. For instance take a look at my feed count. My feed count was fairly constant at 500-550 for weeks, and spiked on the 20th at 721 when my article “Microsoft Windows Comes Of Age - Happy 21st Birthday!” got picked up by a lot of big sites.
But then all of a sudden it just dropped by 40% overnight to around 350, although it has recovered over the last week to around 400, even though my site has been getting much higher traffic than usual over the last 2 weeks.
But, what makes me really question the accuracy of FeedBurner’s stats is the item use statistic.
A few weeks ago I was jumping for joy as my item use stat jumped to over 2,000, which seemed to indicate that each feed reader was reading 3-4 articles per day. However, look at the chart below - my item use according to Feedburner has plummeted to almost zero!
Is anybody else experiencing the same problems? Or are my numbers jumping all over the place because of people using weird RSS readers?
Bookmark & Share
Related Posts
- Feedburner Feed Counts Playing Up Again?
- Feedburner Pro Stats Test
- Recent Feedburner Increases - Don’t Count Your Chickens Just Yet
- Help Me Increase My Feed Subscribers
- Google Desktop - How Does it Select What Feeds To Cover?
- Feedburner Launch Geo-Targeted Ads
- Look Out For Another Feedburner Sub Increase Today
Comment by tyler dewitt on 30 September 2007:
Interesting, I have the same problem with my blog it goes up and down, but generally when it goes down it comes back up higher, so I guess thats a good thing.
Comment by Emma on 24 August 2007:
My subscriber list just dropped to zero. I find it hard to believe everybody unsubscribed last night. I’ve been steadily climbing, almost had enough to ad the feedburner subscriber badge. I’m glad I didn’t that zero would look pretty lame. I think I’ll double check the code. Just looking for answers. Thanks