Why I Dislike Click Tracking in Feeds
I have lot’s of opinions; some of those come through in my software. With statzen I am likely going to provide some features that I am opposed to while helping to educate my users why they are not something I recommend. Click tracking in feeds is one of those things.
What is click tracking? Click tracking is a way to collect information about people who clicked through to your website from a feed. The way click tracking works in a service like statzen is that instead of going directly to your blog from your feed, readers will actually be directed to a specially crafted link on the statzen server and then redirected to your blog. The reader still gets from your feed to your blog with no discernible delay, but I am opposed to this method for several reasons that I will get to in a minute.
Not all click tracking is bad. This exact same method is used for most affiliate sales programs like Linkshare and content ads like Google AdSense. These content monetization opportunities would not exist without click tracking. Similarly, the same method of click tracking is used by most email marketing applications. In both of those scenarios, click tracking makes sense; the pros outweigh the cons.
There is really only one “pro” to click tracking. You are able to count how many times a link in clicked and in some instances, where it was clicked. There are several cons. Here is how I see them:
- Don’t mess with the permalink.
On a philosophical level, I think the permalink is of a higher importance than other links on the internet. A permalink not only says that it will always work, but it also indicates that it is the one true location for that post. Other URLs may work, but the permalink is the one you can trust. Changing the permalink (especially to a different domain all together) seem to me to be a little dishonest.
- Feed click tracking is inaccurate
Philosophical reasons aren’t going to sway all the marketing types and rightfully so. They want to get a message out and measure it’s reach. The problem is that the measurements they are looking at are not what they are trying to capture. Here is how.
If I read a feed in my feed reader and I copy the link and paste it into a post. Unless I intentionally clicked through and got the real permalink, I just published the tracking link on my blog. Likewise, if I right click and “add to del.icio.us”, I just put the tracking link in del.icio.us. That may not seem like a big deal because you are extending the reach of the tracking, but…
- Hurts SEO and other measures
Because of what happened in step two, the tracking link is now getting the SEO love for the link from another blog and the link in del.icio.us. The same is true of automated aggregators that publicly syndicate your feed. Likewise, checking how many blogs linked to a post (or your blog) in Technorati or Google will not return the instances of people using the tracking link. Similarly, del.icio.us will not see the correlation and you will not be able to know how many people linked to you in del.icio.us (or ma.gnolia, my linkblog of choice).
To me, the cons of click tracking in feeds easily outweigh the pros; it is just not worth it. This is especially true if you have other ways to capture the data that click tracking is trying to capture. I imagine that I will eventually add click tracking to statzen, but now you know why I don’t see it as a priority and will likely caution people against using it.
Tags: Atom, Feed, RSS, stats, statzen