Posted in:

Miscellaneous

One of the things that drives bloggers crazy is a wildly fluctuating FeedBurner subscriber count. One day, your subscriber count is surprisingly high, and you find yourself ecstatic. But the next day, your subscriber count is drastically reduced, with no apparent explanation.

But before you go into another chaotic panic, trying to figure out what you might have done to make people unsubscribe, here is a little secret that many people do not know: the FeedBurner subscriber count is not accurate.

FeedBurner Subscriber Stats

How FeedBurner Counts Subscribers

According to FeedBurner, Subscribers is an approximate measure of the number of individuals currently subscribed to your feed. And subscribers are counted as follows:

FeedBurner’s subscriber count is based on an approximation of how many times your feed has been requested in a 24-hour period. Subscribers is inferred from an analysis of the many different feed readers and aggregators that retrieve this feed daily. Subscribers is not computed for browsers and bots that access your feed.

What this means is that this isn’t a number of ALL of the people that are subscribed, but ONLY those who open their feedreaders each day and load their feeds. This also means that a subscriber can be counted, whether or not they actually view your feed in their reader. So a better statistic to pay attention to is reach.

What is Reach?

According to Feedburner, Reach is the statistic which measures how many people view your feed, or click on items within it. As a result, it is typically lower than the number of subscribers.

A great thing about reach is that it also counts people beyond your known subscriber base, such as people who might be viewing your content via a feed search engine or some type of news aggregator website. However, even reach has its problems.

If you comment on websites that use CommentLuv or other similar plugins AND you have are tracking clicks within your FeedBurner account, whenever someone clicks on the link to your latest post, they increase your reach. So this can artificially inflate your reach and distort your feed statistics. On our feed, for example, we had one day where our reach was much higher than our subscribers!

The Logical Approach to FeedBurner Statistics

Although the FeedBurner Subscriber Count and Reach Estimates are not always accurate, we can still learn from them by looking at the overall trend on a weekly, monthly, or all-time basis. If there is a positive trend, then subscribers are increasing. If there is a negative trend, you are losing subscribers and should try to see what you might be doing wrong. But if you look at day-to-date statistics, you’ll just drive yourself crazy trying to understand something that is very inaccurate.

Share or Subscribe

Why don't you subscribe to our feed so you can get the latest from this blog. You can also subscribe to this article's comments feed.

Tags: FeedBurner, RSS, subscribers, visitor loyalty

27 Responses to “Your FeedBurner Subscriber Count Is Not Accurate”

On January 29, 2009 at 8:50 am,Jen Patton wrote:
I always wondered why that worked that way. That was a really concise explanation.
I find that you are right about stats-
1)you can drive yourself totally crazy checking, rechecking them, and checking them one more time– and not just Feedburner Subscriber Stats but all your other stats too.
2)You have to really look at the big picture of all of yor stats and not just one particular one to get a true idea of how your website or blog is doing.
On January 29, 2009 at 11:18 am,Kurt Avish wrote:
Off-topic:
Am back after two days of absence from reading blogs Was busy negotiating. Guess what, a CERTAIN person even started a Splog(spam blog) on me lol. Some people really have nothing to do.
On-topic: My feedburner count? I don’t know why, but is has stopped at a fix number since i migrated to wordpress. But in the feedburner dashboard I can see that in has increase by 4 new subscribers. I think my little feedburner image on my blog has frozen It is not being updated.
By the way I am having problem to migrate my feedburner to Google. It says the url is already in use. Anyone know of this problem please?
On January 29, 2009 at 2:41 pm,binaryday wrote:
Are you noticing these fluctuations even after migrating to google feedproxy. While I had to struggle with this issue on feedburner, I have not encountered this after migrating to feedproxy.
On January 29, 2009 at 2:52 pm,Kim Woodbridge wrote:
Feedburner stats really drive me nuts. I don’t want to care but I do. My unique visits have gone up a lot recently so I’m just going to assume that my visitors don’t use RSS
Thanks for the explanation on reach – that is helpful and reach may be giving more accurate numbers.
On January 29, 2009 at 3:15 pm,Raju wrote:
I wish if someone starts a service which can compete with Feedburner. I have started hating it by the time Google took it over and now even more after I was forced to move my feeds to google server.
On January 29, 2009 at 8:55 pm,Nihar wrote:
you are right. yesterday, my subscriber count was 1100 and today it is 1035.
Why can’t feed burner guys just count the number email subscribers plus reader subscribers and come up with a number?
On January 30, 2009 at 12:12 am,Velvet Blues wrote:
@Jen: Yes, I often obsess too much about stats myself, so this article also serves as my own little reminder.
@Kurt: Haha. Wow! Your own splog!
That’s strange with your feedburner count. But I have noticed that many blogs have that problem. Perhaps you should verify that your code is still valid… As for the strange error, check out the FeedBurner help or Google groups.
@binaryday: I have noticed these issues after the migration… probably not as much, but my count still fluctuates quite a bit… enough to make me uneasy.
@Kim: Yes, unique hits are probably a better way to gauge traffic. And you’d be surprised how many people don’t use RSS. Only within the last 5 or 6 months did I actually start using RSS. I typically just bookmarked websites and then visited them periodically.
On January 30, 2009 at 12:15 am,Velvet Blues wrote:
@Raju: Haha. Yes, Google is greedily gobbling every service up. The one good thing about the move is that my Google account already houses so many services that I use. So it does save me some time every day.
But yes, Google really is becoming somewhat of a monopoly. You’d think that there would be plenty of services to compete, but Google (and the services it devours) have a strong brand that people generally trust.
@Nihar: The problem lies in counting reader subscribers. As for email subscribers, that is the only statistic that IS accurate. Btw, 65 is a huge drop… that’s like 8%.
On January 30, 2009 at 2:53 am,Barbara Swafford wrote:
I agree – checking our stats daily can drive us nuts. Like you mentioned, I find checking stats from week to week or monthly gives us a better perspective as to whether our blogs are growing or not.
Great explanation. Thank you.
On January 30, 2009 at 3:09 am,Ajith Edassery | DollarShower wrote:
Yep, you are right on the 24hr reach algorithm they have If you want to see more or less consistent numbers do the following:
- Post every day (so that email subscribers will be forcibly counted)
- Somehow if you are not in a position to post for a day, edit an old article and ‘Publish’ it
This is my theory but seems to work But it wont work for those abrupt fall in count.
It’s always better not to focus too much on these numbers (though sometimes inevitable for advertising/promotion purpose). For this year, I am mainly focusing on quality search visits (with good reach) and overall authority of the blog. With Alexa getting totally screwed up and FeedBurner moving to Google, god alone knows what will be the next thing we need to worry about
On January 30, 2009 at 10:32 am,Dennis Edell wrote:
Mine dropped over half when I moved to Google lol…all good again after about 2 days.
Google says they have a more accurate system functioning…we shall see.
On January 30, 2009 at 2:28 pm,Velvet Blues wrote:
@Barbara: Thanks for stopping by. Yes, after almost pulling my hair out, wondering why my stats were so inconsistent, I finally decided to do some research.
@Ajith: Yeh, you are right. Fortunately, our stats aren’t important for any sort of promotion or sponsorship. So it’s just vanity.
@Dennis: Yes, I nearly lost my breath when I saw a steep drop in my subscribers after the move. But fortunately, stats were quickly restored.
On January 31, 2009 at 5:47 am,stratosg wrote:
Well i’ve always noticed that my count goes up when i have a new article. That’s probably because google reader just makes sure there is something new before it updates so feedburner does not count it at all. anyway in my oppinion RSS and feedburner is just a way to bring people in. so why not count who is actually coming in rather than how many see your “ad”. nice post indeed Shirley…
On January 31, 2009 at 7:57 am,Velvet Blues wrote:
@stratos: Well, yes, that’s really the most important, ‘who is coming in’. But sometimes we like to know the amount of people who ‘might’ come in. And if we are selling ad space or even selling our website, the higher the subscribers, the better.
On February 1, 2009 at 6:05 am,Kurt Avish wrote:
I changed the feedburner codes and now its working fine. Maybe the problem was with the codes.
On February 1, 2009 at 7:22 am,Velvet Blues wrote:
Great… Yeh, its usually always something small like that.
On February 1, 2009 at 10:15 am,Ben Pei wrote:
Yeah this is really irritating at times. Thats why we gotta move our feeds over to google now. Have you done yours?
On February 1, 2009 at 10:21 am,Ben Pei wrote:
@Jen Patton, it really makes you crazy. You may have a constant 1000 subscribers but sometimes the counter shows 700 and sometimes it shows 200.
Kinda scare you at times tho..
On February 2, 2009 at 4:18 pm,Velvet Blues wrote:
@Ben: Yep, it’s been almost two weeks now. And strangely, our subscriber count has been much higher than it was previously… Maybe that means that the old FeedBurner wasn’t counting everyone.
On February 3, 2009 at 5:24 am,Ben Pei wrote:
Lol yeah Shirley, I was surprised by my count as well. Quite a bit of encouragement there.
On August 1, 2009 at 2:37 am,The Envoy wrote:
Is there any real way of viewing accurate subscriber stats then?
On December 12, 2009 at 8:15 pm,Steve wrote:
Ah trying to get a useful picture of feed and email audience has got to be the holy grail. I suspect that the error margins are huge. My gut says that reach underestimates readers but I wouldn’t put my lunch money on it.
On February 17, 2010 at 5:51 am,lektire wrote:
i have same problem on my blog, its too much readers
On August 9, 2010 at 11:23 pm,Kavita wrote:
Feedburner count for my wordpress blog is not increasing beyond 1. Where is the problem?
On August 10, 2010 at 2:38 am,Velvet Blues wrote:
@Kavita: Your blog is new and only has 8 posts… Perhaps you don’t have any regular subscribers yet. It took this blog several months before it acquired a significant reader base as reported by FeedBurner.
On January 12, 2011 at 5:06 pm,Benjer McVeigh wrote:
Thanks for this…I was curious last week when one of my posts had a huge reach, almost twice the number of my subscribers!
On March 7, 2011 at 3:15 am,Mike wrote:
On the topic of statistic accuracy, I was wondering how accurately the Blogger ‘stats’ function really is. I’ve been doing some searching and haven’t been able to turn up anything concrete. Your thoughts?