Now that you’re able to track your site visitors, what about those people who just read your blog directly from an RSS reader? How do you count those as visits? Well, luckily there are a few services out there that are able to help you measure who reads your posts via RSS, what links are clicked, and your feed trends. However, the one thing that they are unable to do is accurately measure visitor paths and such; feed stats are not yet as robust or specific as website stats.

Feedburner
Feedburner was purchased by Google about a year ago. Feedburner allows you to take the feed you already have from your current blogging platform and “burn” it so that Feedburner can begin tracking the information. Feedburner also offers branded email delivery service, where it will blast your feed as a daily email to subscribers who opt-in to this service. There is also something called “Reach” in Feedburner, which is the total number of people who have taken action [viewed or clicked] on the content in your feed.

FeedBlitz
Feedblitz is another service that offers feed tracking, in addition to newsletters, surveys, and more. This might be a great option for anyone who is interested in sending additional emails out other than just the daily feed email. Their FAQ page is great, and I would advise reading up on both FeedBlitz and Feedburner, but at the end of the day, I will certainly recommend installing them both and deciding which one you like better.

Wordpress plugin: FeedStats
FeedStats is a feed tracking plugin for Wordpress users. Don’t let the German scare you! It’s also available in English and it’s pretty nice to not have to log into a separate account to get your feed stats: they’re right there in your Dashboard. With this service you can block your own IP so you don’t count your own visits.

What you need to remember when it comes to feed subscribers is that they don’t always come to your site. Therefore, it’s quite difficult to know the exact number of people viewing your content. If you have a blog, feed tracking [in addition to a statistics counter] is vital in order to accurately measure who’s seeing your posts.