RSS Works: Hard metrics to prove it

Marketing specialists constantly ask if RSS marketing works and if this can be proven.

It's time to take a look at some real-life RSS metrics from real-life sellers. These will show you what kind of results you can expect to see in RSS.

First I presented this information at the Conference of Trade Unions in New York City, the first conference entirely dedicated to RSS.

To clarify, we will analyze RSS metrics from 4 different points of view, each of which will show a facet of RSS marketing and a different way to capture RSS metrics. This combined data will give you the answer of whether RSS marketing is for you, as an addition to email marketing or not.

1. CLICK THROUGH THE RSS FEES TO THE SITE: THE SIDE OF THE RSS AGGREGATOR

RSS statistics should be more relevant when they come from real RSS aggregators and their providers, since these people can accurately measure how their users actually use RSS.

Customer Reader [http://www.customreader.com], which recently launched a desktop RSS aggregator, which sellers can bookmark themselves and then distribute to their readers, provided us with their latest data. This data is based on 3,500 users of your brand RSS aggregator and in the last [two weeks ago] 48 hours of use of your reader.

The most interesting fact is the average CTR of 23% (click rate) of the feed to the site in the last 48 hours, which shows that RSS works in terms of bringing readers of the message to the site. RSS users are clicking on the RSS content!

Now, what is the "feed to the side" CTR? It simply means that 23% of end users who subscribe to various sources, clicked at least once on one of the content elements of the sources to which they are subscribed.

2. CLICK ON THE FEES OF THE CONTENT ARTICLE TO THE SITE: THE SIDE OF THE SELLER OF RSS SOLUTIONS

Given the different RSS metric systems and the fact that no marketing tool can be measured 100% accurately from the side of the external tracking service, it is also important to see the statistics of the RSS solution providers.

To this end, SimpleFeed [http://www.simplefeed.com], the providers of one of the most advanced RSS marketing solutions, provided some basic statistics.

Statistics are based on an application. Sample of 10,000 end users, average of 30 days and 4 months of data.

They are seeing an average CTR of 6.8% from the content element [individual content element in an RSS feed] to the site and an average CTR of 150% [1.5 clicks] from the feed to the site within 30 days.

3. SUBSCRIPTIONS AND CLICK RATES: THE SIDE OF THE MERCHANT / EDITORIAL

And finally, let's take a look at the statistics from the point of view of the publisher / marketer.

Lockergnome.com is one of the most popular technological sites on the Internet.

Although they are serving a more tech-savvy audience, Lockergnome is an excellent example of the results you can ultimately achieve with RSS.

First, they are seeing a 5: 1 ratio in favor of the number of RSS subscribers versus email subscribers, and even more interesting, a 500% better click rate with RSS than with email.

4. SEARCH ENGINE VISIBILITY

These are just some of his achievements, as a result of his RSS marketing activities ...

a] 120 page search results in important industry search terms
1 Voip vs traditional telephone system
1 VoIP solution provider
2 small VoIP companies
2 VoIP architecture
5 VoIP telephone equipment
6 benefits of VoIP
7 VoIP costs for small businesses
b] A 75% increase in traffic to the corporate website

OVERVIEW

These metrics clearly show that RSS works for sellers and publishers.

This information alone, also considering that RSS clearly receives 100% of its content and actually gives you a lot of new marketing opportunities, such as podcasting, should be enough to do something about RSS now.