I was analysing one particular site (blog) I have today and noticed something interesting that I really should have picked up on before.. The page impressions Google reported for the month were only 20% of the impressions Awstats was reporting. At first I thought Google simply wasn't able to fill all the ads (ie. displaying PSAs 80% of the time), but then the penny dropped! The majority of the site traffic is being viewed through an RSS aggregator so the Adsense ads are never shown to 80% of the site traffic! It's a shame Adsense for Feeds isn't public yet As there is no YPN for Aussies I guess I'll have to look at affiliate programs or something (is there a network that has CPM advertising for feeds?)
People who subscribed through RSS Feeds tend to click less on ads than people who visit your site using searchengines. I expect the ctr rate in the feeds to be rather low. It might turn some people away from your blog as well.
I have not had great luck with YPN on feeds. I have it on one of my popular blogs and last month it received 0 clicks, while the site itself does well with adsense.
wow 80% of traffic on feeds. So really the challenge is to shift the traffic onto your blog, or at least work on boosting it.
hmm. I did not get it. Usually you want to put only a teaser in your rss feed. Interested users should click and go to your website to read complete article... Are you putting your whole article in your RSS feed?
I don't think anyone uses the feeds I have setup on my blogs just yet, possibly in the future but 90% of my traffic comes from a web browser, not a feed reader.
Well, I've never trusted AWstats, that script really counts everything, like crawlers, feed aggregrators, really everything. If you want to count your visitors you should use a service like Statcounter.com or Google Analytics.
yup, only provide feed summary/excerpt, not the whole post! i feel that feed aggregators should just serve as a teaser of the real article!
I don't understand why anyone would want to provide the whole content of an article or blog in a feed. It defeats the object of using RSS to drive traffic to your site.
I agree that AWSTATS is not perfect, however the newer version of AWSTATS separates viewed traffic from non-viewed traffic.
To keep your readers happy. Just google "Chris Pirillo full-content rss feed" too see one community's backlash against someone trying to maximize every penny out of their loyal readers, only to have it backfire. Just do what Weblogs Inc. and others have done: 1) Provide a full-content feed with embedded ads. (sure, you still probably won't make as much as you would from regular AdSense, but there's not much else you can do here) AND 2) Provide a summary feed for those folks who'd rather just read a summary and click-thru to your site to read your articles.
The gist of that backlash seems to be that people don't want to see advertising with their content. But the advertising is what pays for it in the first place, when it's a feed from a commercial website. We are always going to have this conflict between people who want something for nothing, and those who need to make money from their writing.
Thanks to everyone for their replies! I've held off replying back until now because I've been conducting a little 'experiment'. I've done some subsequent calculations/checking and it turns out 50% of the traffic was through RSS feeds (not 80% as first stated). This is still a large number and I believe it was large because I was providing the full article in the feed, not just a summary. So what I did was simply put a teaser in the feed as suggested here (just using Wordpress' option.. not the neatest solution but good enough). The results have been staggering! The feed traffic is now down to 28% of the total site traffic this month but what's more impressive is the Adsense earnings have almost doubled (so far this month at least). The tricky part is working out how much of the increase is due to the feed change as some of the recent articles have been picked up very well in Google (also increasing traffic).. Anyway, it's clear that having only a teaser in your RSS feeds is the way to go, even though the visitors using feeds won't click as much.
visitors who clicked thru to the site from a feed are basically pre-qualified, because they were interested enuf to follow up to the real content... so if the ads are targeted well, you might have seen an increase in ctr, vs. what came in via the search engines. don't just lump it under "adsense earnings" in general... always analyze the earnings by ctr vs. epc, so you'll know what caused the increased earnings.
No. The gist of the backlash was that it was annoying to have to click-thru on every RSS feed item of Chris' just to read the article. I, for one, was one of the many who stopped reading his fine blog until he re-enabled full-content RSS feeds. Also, RE: RSS readers being pre-qualified... Does anyone have any stats on that? IMHO, RSS readers are pre-qualified but not necessarily to click on your ads. They are more in the "I'm a loyal reader / browser of this site" than a search engine visitor, who is more on a seek & destroy mission to get some kind of job done. It'll always be a mix of both, but that's just been my impression. EX: one of my blogs has 2,000 RSS subscribers... the only time that blog started making decent money was when it started ranking for various terms & the search visitors were clicking on the ads (on archived pages), not the feed subscribers to newly-posted pages.
Fez, you've completely summarized my thoughts on the matter almost verbatim!! The vast majority of traffic that converts (ie. clicks) come from search engines. That's why people are so keen to update their blogs/sites daily - to get more pages indexed and a larger variety of search phrases showing them.