How to understand the Reach metric in Feedburner

Running a website, specifically blogs, today means that you probably give people a way to subscribe to the content that is on your website. Lots of people use Feedburner, a website content syndication service, that gives you the ability to publish their website feeds, get people subscribing to your feed and promote it. Many themes today also give you the ability to quickly add your website feed as well so that you can start getting subscribers.

If you have a Feedburner account for your website and you are getting subscribers then you may have noticed a statistic called “Reach” and wondered what exactly it is? To better understand this you must first understand the “Subscriber” statistic. The “Subscriber” statistic in Feedburner refers to the number of people who have signed up to your website’s feed. The “Reach” statistic is calculated from the number of your subscribers who clicked on content in your website’s feed. It is a much more useful indication of the success of the content that you are publishing because it tells you who was interested enough to click on your content.

What do successful website statistics look like?

What kind of success ratio should you aim for when looking at your website’s feed statistics? How much reach should your content have to be deemed a successful? These questions vary on the website that you run because success on the web is a relative term depending on the action you are looking for from your visitors. For instance, if you are looking to measure the success of your checkout process against the number of visitors that your website has and you run an e-commerce website this metric would be a great top level measurement that you could then drill down into further. If you run a content driven website that’s success is dependent on people looking at the content you publish then understanding the relationship of reach versus the total number of feed subscribers is important which you can then break down into the finer and more granular parts. There is a saying that “Success is how you choose to define it” and that is definitely the case here.

Who is looking at what in my website feed?

Now that we understand that you need subscribers in order to have reach the next question becomes “How many people are viewing which content through my website’s feed?” Feedburner has the ability to give you the numbers of people who viewed a particular piece of content on your website’s feed for a particular time period. The ability to do this is located when you login to Feedburner, click on your website’s feed and look below the graph area of your subscribers and their reach and it goes by the title “Popular Feed Items”.

Popular Feed Items shows you the content that people were interested enough to click on and how many of them click on it. Pretty useful right?

From here you can figure out which type of content does best and it can give you new ideas and generate insights for future content development based on the success of past content.

Now that you better understand the relationship involved in people who subscribe to your website and the content they are interested in you can figure out better ways to create content that will keep them coming back for more!