RSS Works: Hard Metrics to Prove It

Marketers are constantly asking if RSS marketing works and if this can be proved. It's time to take a look at some real-life RSS metrics from real-life marketers. These will show you what kind of results you can expect to see from RSS. I first presented this data at the Syndicate Conference in New York City, the first conference entirely devoted to RSS. To make a point, we'll take a look at RSS metrics from 4 different viewpoints, each demonstrating one facet of RSS marketing and a different way of capturing RSS metrics. This data combined will give you the answer of whether RSS marketing is for you, as an addition to e-mail marketing, or not. 1. CLICK-THROUGH RATES FROM RSS FEED TO SITE: THE RSS AGGREGATOR SIDE RSS statistics should be most relevant when coming from actual RSS aggregators and their vendors, since these people can measure precisely how their users are actually using RSS. Customer Reader [2. CLICK-THROUGH RATES FROM CONTENT ITEM TO SITE: THE RSS SOLUTION VENDOR SIDE Considering the different RSS metrics systems and the fact that no marketing tool whatsoever can be measured 100% precisely from the outside tracking service side, seeing stats from RSS solutions vendors is important as well. On this end, some basic stats were supplied from SimpleFeed [Lockergnome.com is one of the most popular tech sites on the internet. Although they are serving a more tech savvy audience, Lockergnome is an excellent example of the results you can ultimately hope to achieve using RSS. First of all, they are seeing a ration of 5:1 in favor of the number of RSS subscribers against e-mail subscribers, and even more interesting, a 500% better clickthrough ratio with RSS than with e-mail. 4. SEARCH ENGINE VISIBILITY The BTI Group is a smaller VoIP provider and, through their high ranking blogsite [