Mar
12
Heavy RSS Use Plus Alexa = Costing Us Advertising Dollars
Posted by Tim Bourquin
I’ve had several conversations with prospective advertisers this week for TraderInterviews.com. TI is our site for online investors that has a podcast, marketplace directory of resources and Digg-like message board. This site happens to attract a pretty tech-savvy group of visitors because many are trading their own stock accounts online and are “veterans” of using the Internet for everything in their life. As such, it we have thousands of listeners to the podcast who subscribe to the RSS feed and rarely visit the site because they get the content via iTunes or another aggregator.
We insert our sponsor’s banners in the RSS feed, so impressions isn’t the problem. Issues arise when I tell a potential advertiser a numbers of visitors and RSS subscribers because they then go over to Alexa and see that our ranking doesn’t really reflect that same number. I know, I know - we can go on forever about how Alexa isn’t really that accurate, yet lots of folks use it.
It’s almost enough for me to turn off the RSS feed and force people to come to the site to get the content. Almost. But then we’d lose the iTunes folks and I can’t afford to alienate that group. Not to mention the fact that it wouldn’t technically be a podcast anymore.
So we’re stuck in a tough place here. I want our RSS feed to be popular - but not too popular…
Any and all suggestions are welcome.
March 17th, 2008 at 7:40 pm
I know I am preaching to the choir but since you asked…I think the onus is on us to hold the line in two areas with advertisers. One is the educate them about how this stuff works - you cannot compare apples to oranges, i.e. downloadable media to traditional web traffic reports. And two, to deliver outcomes as compared to impressions. Help them set a target that they would use to measure success, and then go about doing things in the shows/in the feed, to make that happen.
I am working on a committee with the Association for Downloadable Media and this speaks to one of our primary goals. Keep us posted on how things turn out.
P.S. It used to be that Alexa did not track Mac users I think (??) Studies have shown that Mac users are much more active web users than PC folks, so there is one more reason to take Alexa off the table for useful tracking data.
April 4th, 2008 at 7:31 am
The key here is to educate your advertisers. If they are blindly using Alexa as their metric, they are looking at one tree in a forest. They need to be taught that server stats are more reliable. Granted, they can be difficult to read. If the client can’t learn to understand that RSS stats are important–even after explaining that iTunes is the number 1 seller of digital media–then they will never “get it.” Until you teach them.
July 16th, 2008 at 11:29 pm
I also think if you use http://www.feedburner.com you can get stats for your RSS feeds. This way you can show them the true numbers for RSS.