Help me explain my feedburner stats!! Last Friday I relaunched my blog which was sitting inactive for a while, and have been making what I think are quite high quality posts, as well as putting in a lot of promotion work: e-mailing people in my niche, getting stumbled, gradually tweaking the site, getting on some forums, etc. Yes I've had a lot of traffic and even a few (literally 3!) comments, although largely the traffic is disposable (stumbleupon), and the comments have come from people I've emailed in my niche. I was surprised on Sunday to see my subscribers go from 10 to 14 in a day and I just figured that maybe some of my promotion was paying off. Today I was amazed to see my subcriber count leapt from 14 to 24 since I checked it yesterday!! I would like to think they were real subscribers, but it seems pretty unlikely: I am have heard about Feedburner stats being inaccurate before... So do you think I have 24 subscribers or not? Thanks in advance for your input Attatchment: Feedburner stats screenshot
I put FeedBurner on a blog of mine, and it said I had like 9 subscribers after a couple days. I also had my own browser checking for RSS updates automatically every hour. After a few days I changed my browser to only check once a day... and now I am showing 1 (sometimes 0) subscribers on that blog. The two things seemed related. So I don't think FeedBurner stats are accurate, more like a vague ballpark. You might have 24 subscribers, or you might have 1 or 2 (or 50, I suppose). Don't know why it's so hard for them to get it right, I guess their system is they count hit on their feed for your blog and try to guess, based on the hit type, how many people are actually subscribing. Whatever their formula, it need work!
I agree it needs work LongHaul... the next day it was down to 11. i wish there was a way to count your subscribers, the xml file gets plenty hits in google analytics as well.
Feedburner is not flawed and it is accurate. The reason your numbers change daily is because Feedburner counts the number of people that accessed your feed on that particular day. It is the number of people that opened up your feed on that day, not the total number subscribed to it.
yes, but if you read the description on the site it tells you that it doesn't count all the people subscribed, it is just the number that access the feed.
Feedburner isn't designed to count every subscriber. It is designed as a simple site where you can manage you feed and get simple result. There would be no real way of counting how many people are subscribed. What it does is give you a general idea of how many people of accessing your feed. If you want a more accurate way of checking just change the average to a month and a week. You should get a better idea. Feedburner isn't totally 100% accurate but it isn't inaccurate, there are a couple of bugs in it. its the best we have at the moment so don't complain.