By Senior Editor – Kris Smith (@croncast)

There’s been quite a hullabaloo about Google Analytics now integrating Feedburner data over the last few days over here and here.

Let’s just call this what it is – a hacked implementation of the most useless numbers for feed metrics available.

It’s been more than 6 months since Google bought Feedburner. Wait, it’s been more than a year. Wait, wait, it’s coming to me . . . it’s been over two and a half years!

What people have stumbled upon in Google Analytics is a measure for people clicking through the feed and coming to their site. Big deal. What it tells you is that the feed link was the referrer. That isn’t brilliant or news worthy. Seriously, it is embarrassing that all this time later users are happy with 1/100th of the information that feeds have to offer. A feed click through is somehow magic?

Besides, if publishers are releasing full content in their feeds the likelihood that a user will click through are between slim and never. There is no need to visit the site. All the valuable metrics are then held in the reader application, Feedburner or not measured.

Google Analytics isn’t going to tell a user how many times content was viewed or by what reader software. It isn’t going to give up the valuable IP, GEO IP, time of day or number of feeds a user is subscribed to. And it most certainly isn’t delivering on the promise that syndicating content via feeds adds value to the bottom line.

For years I have debated with friends about why Google bought Feedburner. Some said it was for ad inventory and others said it was simply to own the largest syndication network their analytics.

We know the the latter isn’t true because in two and a half years I could have trained my ASPCA cat how to integrate the two platforms. Maybe not, but I could surely create a big button for him to push that add the crontab for making it happen.

On the first point, I don’t think this is true either. The Feedburner Advertising Network (FAN) wasn’t a broad enough program to give Google enough data to forecast what their revenues would be from RSS ads.

It took Google a year and a half to figure out how to run Adsense in feeds. It took me one and a half hours  to figure out how to do in feeds using their mobile platform. It took me one weekend three years ago to get dynamic ads both text and images pulled via content keywords into feeds using OpenX.

My consistent line has been that they bought Feedburner so that they could sit at both ends of the content pipe – creation and syndication. Prior to Feedburner Google didn’t have an active ping platform to accept the influx of new content entering the interwebs.

They had to sit on the sidelines and scrape services for the fresh content. With the purchase they then had the ability to have structured data and fresh URL’s  fed directly to them for indexing.

I guess that only those on the inside will really know. I don’t know for sure why they bought the largest RSS aggregator and never iterated another feature from it other than a half-baked ad effort that yields a miniscule CPM for publishers. There is a ton of data that is being wasted when it comes to feed consumption and I guess that Google is has its reasons for keeping it hidden.

From what I have read there are promises of additional integration. The question that I have to ask is why no one created a startup to deliver to the complete set of metrics?

DISCLOSURE OF MATERIAL CONNECTION: http://cmp.ly/0