I’ve had to do this a few times in the past, so found myself googling it again this morning when I was updating some feeds…
If you use a Feedburner feed to allow others to receive posts from your blog or site, you may see URLs like this come through:
[box color=”gray”]http://mysite.com/post-title/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+myfeed
+%28My+Feed%29&utm_content=FeedBurner[/box]
So what causes the nasty and very additions to the URL (the bit that starts with ?utm_source)?
Answer? Google Analytics within FeedBurner (remember that Feedburner is owned by Google)…
There is a positive, in that if you use Google Analytics, then this will allow you to customise your Feed to give you additional information on specific campaigns or traffic sources. However for most content creators, even if they use Google Analytics, they won’t be making changes in this area. For me as a Woopra Analytics and Wordpress user, it just makes my site configuration look ugly. For those with Domino Blogs, the extra information on the URL tends to cause nasty 404 errors.
Do how to fix?
Go to your Feedburner account, select the feed you wish to change, then Configure Stats (under the Optimize tab). Finally, disable the checkbox marked ‘Track clicks as a traffic source in Google Analytics’. You can leave ‘Item views’ and ‘Item link clicks’ checked if you wish:
Your feed URLs will now look like the much more elegant:
[box color=”gray”]http://mysite.com/post-title/[/box]
Much better!