Reid Dossinger

How many people you think they got working on that Feedburner thing over there? One? Half? A summer intern? A guy who works on it while he watches football? The flaws and problems with Feedburner have been frustrating to say the least, so I was pretty damn excited when, a little over a month ago, Feedburner finally announced that they were integrating the ability to add in Google Analytics campaign data to the end of feed item URLs. This was huge. Before this, you had to add in the string into the original RSS feed, which most of us couldn't do since we didn't have access to that original feed, but wanted to track when people were coming from our feeds. My excitement ended, though, when I cranked up the feature and saw what it did to my stats. Yes, it was helpful to see who came from Google Reader or Bloglines, but if the content was syndicated, it stripped out the referrer. This was a problem with my music blog . Hype Machine is by far and away our #1 referrer, and when I imp...

In years of working with web analytics, I've had to try and explain the difference between page views, visitors and visits, and why people looking at basic stats should focus on visits. I can usually get the point across with the simple explanation and be pretty sure that people get it, but I once told a more involved (and more fun) story, and it seems that this story was the difference between a still-slightly-confused "Oh, okay" and what I got after this story, which was "Ohhh! Okay, now I understand it." With smiles. The story: Tom just moved into a new 4-room apartment and is exhausted. He just wants to spend the day sitting on the couch and watching the full season three of Mad Men that he has squirreled away on his DVR. About fifteen minutes into the show, Tom's doorbell rings, so he has to stop the DVR and get up off the couch. It's his friend Kate, stopping by to pick up a DVD she's loaned Tom, so she only see's the front room as Tom pic...