By Senior Editor – Kris Smith (@croncast)

I am a RSS stats junkie. From RSS stats you can demonstrate almost anything that you want to (like most any other statistics, but work with me people). You can highlight trends, show how another integrated marketing helped your feed at a specific time of day, try to gauge some ROI from your RSS feeds or tell what applications or bots hit your feed most often. And don’t forget click-throughs.

There’s tons of information that can be pulled from feeds by tracking them. FYI, if you are not tracking your feeds you should be it will open your eyes to a new group of people standing right outside your door.
A few years ago FeedBurner’s take was that we are measuring engagement. I would agree.

“Your Content is Bigger Than Your Feed
Today’s key takeaway is that feeds represent only one aspect of a publisher’s overall content consumption. We’re living in a world of distributed media after all: people might be reading your content directly on your site, within a widget, via resyndicated headlines on another site, or on a social networking site.”

RSS has the ability to more adequately demonstrate engagement since a user actively decides to make your content part of their life. Think of it this way, what if you were able to get people to subscribe to banner ads? What would those statistics look like? You would measure click-throughs, time of day, conversion ratios, etc. Feeds are no different, though more benign. The ad just happens to be your content.