Where do your subscribers come from?
Ever wondered how your new subscribers arrived at your blog? If you’re using FeedBurner, the best you can see is how many subscrobers you have, what they’re using to read your feed, etc… Lots of useful statistics, but it doesn’t show you how they arrived at your site, and what path they took through your site before eventually subscribing to your feed.
Well, thanks to the ingenious idea from this post: “What’s your blog analytics set up? Here’s mine.“, you can use Google Analytics to watch your visitors subscribing in droves. Well, trickles for some (and drips for others).
Assuming you’ve installed the Google Analytics tracking code in your site’s template, you can just add the “click tracking” code to your subscribe links. Liam Morrison (I assume) says it better:
As Google Analytics allows you to measure outbound clicks from a site from any particular link, I’m using this as a useful way of tracking who is subscribing to the rss feed, the content they read here before signing up, and how they find this blog. True, not everyone who clicks on your feed link will complete the subscription process, but I’m comfortable with using this measure as a pretty close estimation.
If you view the source code for this page, you should see that I’ve added the following line to the to anchor tag for the “subscribe” links at the top right of the page:
onClick="javascript:urchinTracker ('/subscriber/top_text/');"
If you’re viewing this post on it’s own page, then on the right you’ll see the “Comments Feed” link. I’ve also added the tracking code there. But, because this link is being called using the WordPress “comments_rss_link()” function, I’ve surrounded the link with a “span” tag, and added the “onclick” code to there.
For example:
<span id="comments_subscribe_span"
onClick="javascript:urchinTracker ('/subscriber/comments_subscribe/');" >
<?php comments_rss_link('Comments Feed'); ?>
</span>
Now all I need is a few more subscribers to see if this really works. 
