Feedburner Analytics

How to stop FeedBurner from uglifying your clean URLs

by with No Comment Misc

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:

Feedburner Analytics

Your feed URLs will now look like the much more elegant:

[box color=”gray”]http://mysite.com/post-title/[/box]

Much better!

Thrilled about this… Kudos Analytics!

by with No Comment AnnouncementsIBM Connections

As you should be aware by now, Collaboration Matters is a reseller of Kudos Badges.  We’ve recommended it and implemented it at some very large (and very small) Connections customers over the past year, and it is a fantastic tool for enhancing user adoption within the Social Business platform.

When Adam Brown (of Kudos Badges developers, ISW) and I met during Autumn 2012, one of the concepts we discussed most passionately is the knowledge that developing Kudos Badges has given his organisation.  Knowledge about the use of Connections within organisations, the speed of adoption, barriers to use, the demands of internal communications departments and Connections Champions and most importantly, the way in which Connections itself has been architected at the application and database level.  As I told Adam at the time, I don’t believe that anyone else outside of IBM development now better understands how the Connections database tables are linked and updated.

So, where has that got ISW?  Today, Adam announced Kudos Analytics:

We have found that most users of Connections really just want some light weight reporting that is easy to access and install. Kudos Analytics takes about 10 minutes to install and get started. This is just the first step and we are planning on adding Kudos Analytics capabilities for individual Communities so Community Managers can see what is happening in their realm. We would also love to hear your thoughts and ideas on what else is needed so come visit us at IBM Connect pedestal C49!!

The new Cognos integration within IBM Connections 4.0 is amazingly powerful, but it is also a chunk of technology that needs to be deployed, managed and customised to get the most from it.  For larger customers it is absolutely the tool they need to get metrics and trends from Connections deployments.

However, for smaller organisations or for those without deep Cognos or BI knowledge or skills, Kudos Analytics could be exactly what is required.  Take a look at the video above and make sure you meet with ISW at IBM Connect 2013 if you attending.  If not, then get in touch with either ISW or Collaboration Matters and we’ll be delighted to take you through this great new solution.