Habitually Good

I publish my blog feed using FeedBurner. And I always used to think that the statistics shown in my FeedBurner account for the number of subscribers is correct. Well, as it turns out I was completely wrong. And your statistics shown in your FeedBurner account could be wrong as well (especially if you are using a WordPress blog).

Here’s how to make sure that your stats are correct:

First, why are the stats wrong?

There is nothing wrong with FeedBurner, but it still may not be giving you the right number of subscribers to your blog. It only gives you the number of subscribers that have subscribed using the FeedBurner feed link (in my case: http://feeds.feeduburner.com/HabituallyGood). That sounds right, you would say, but no, if you are using WordPress, there is another RSS link that your users may discover when they visit your website.

The Header File

The header file of your WordPress theme typically contains a link tag for your blog feed, and it contains the original WordPress feed URL for your blog. A lot of people subscribe to your blog through tools which auto-discover your URL, and may end up subscribing to this feed link instead of the FeedBurner URL.

Here is what this tag looks like:

<link rel=”alternate” type=”application/rss+xml” title=”<?php bloginfo(‘name’); ?> RSS Feed” href=”<?php bloginfo(‘rss2_url’); ?>” />

To get the correct stats on your FeedBurner, replace the above code to:

<link rel=”alternate” type=”application/rss+xml” title=”<?php bloginfo(‘name’); ?> RSS Feed” href=”http://feeds.feedburner.com/HabituallyGood” />

This allows your pages to have the right Feed URL in the header.

How to see if there are subscribers on your original feed URL

If you use Google Webmaster Tools, then you can see at least the subscribers that use Google Tools to subscribe to this feed. Go to Statistics->Subscriber Stats, and you will see a table like this:

Well, that is more than 20% of what my FeedBurner statistics show. All people who subscribe to my blog, please shift to http://feeds.feedburner.com/HabituallyGood.

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