We all know email is not reliable transport. Mails get lost, get delayed, etc. But when you are using Feedburner, a service now own by Google, to distribute your blogs newsletter via email, you normally expects some sort of reliability.
Now look at the following screenshot and you will be shocked to see delay in email delivery by feedburner.
Also same mail contained a post dated back to June 2, 2008. This means delay of 24 days or almost a month!
I just wish this did not happen to all DW readers who subscribed by email. Please let me know if you are getting deliveries delayed like this. I will try to find a nice feedburner alternative then, most likely FeedBlitz.
24 Comments
I never faced such problem….
@Pavan
I also faced for once yesterday.
On some occasions I get email feeds delivered 2-3 days late I think it may be common…
Me too never faced such problems !
This reminds me the Great Indian Postal Department .
@ArpitNext
lolz.. but he Great Indian Postal Department is not run by Google! 😉
I use a different service to deliver my mail and they have enough servers to get the job done, they also integerate with Feedburner so you can stick with them for your feed analytics.
http://keywebdata.aweber.com/
Do not cancel your Feedburner account, you will lose all your subscribers. Just don’t use them to deliver email.
Feedburner email formatting is so bad, IT SUCKS does not even convey how I feel about Feedburner emails. I would rather they just send text emails than that crap.
Seth Godin can send email updates everyday to me via Feedburner, I would read what he says if he wrote it on the sidewalk in chalk.
Besides do you want your subscribers to get every single post you write? I mean, I post almost everyday. If my readers want to they can read it every day.
But I do not want to shove it down their throats with an inbox full of email, do you?
I don’t email my subscribers every day, they would all unsubscribe.
Over emailing your subscribers is a good way to lose them all. Hope this helps – Chris Lang
@Chris
Thanks for nice info Chris… 🙂
Feedburner behaving crazy 🙁 It is not showing site stats :(. Feed flare is in place and so should be site data tracking, but it is not so. The subscriber stats are working though.
@Gaurav
I don’t know why these big companies want to acquire services which they can’t handle properly
Same yahoo did to del.icio.us. there are many services which became worse after their acquisition… 🙁
after 2 days of no tracking, feedburner is back, but it is still kinda behaving weird 🙁 statcounter showing a lot of difference with feedburner.
I don’t use Feedburner. But I have a question. What happens if you leave FeedBurner? All your RSS subscribers point to their feed, not yours.
Do they offer a redirect after you leave them. Does anyone know?
@Gaurav
Statcounter and feedburner have many differences so don’t expect them to match. Actually no two tracking system can give you similar stats.
@Chris
Feedburner used to offer temporary redirect as I remember. I surely know about this and will post in details soon. Need to go through some articles for that.
Thanks Rahul,
I am following comments here, so I will be watching for you, thanks again.
Yeps, but they must have shown some correlation 😛 but now they are almost in tandem 😀
@Chris
I posted answer to your question in much details here as a post… 🙂
Please check it and let me know if anything is missing. 🙂
@Gaurav
Hmm… do you use statcounter to track feed stats??
I use Statcounter for the normal web stats, and not feeds. Is there any specific reason to do so?
@Gaurav, Google does estimate how many RSS subscribers you have and considers it is an indicator of blog quality. Especially in Blogsearch.
Also it is a conversion indicator as important as conversions to sales and email subscribers.
With readers following you in so many different ways these days, I really an interested in how they convert and how each channel converts.
I have been putting it off for while now, but Twitter and how that channel converts is my next foray into analytics and testing.
@Gaurav
No. You can’t use StatCounter to track feeds I guess. Thats why I wondered.
And if you want to compare, compare between trackers of similar categories, like StatCounter, SiteMeter, Google Analytic.
Feedburner uses all together different methods. I will publish details about them soon.
@Chris
Thanks for info. I guess as a blogger or publisher more you diverge, better for your site.
As an example, you can’t force MyBlogLog uses to follow you on Twitter so better post your updates at both place.
Actually I use three stat analytics- feedburner ( came free with it 😛 ) Statcounter and G analytics. and almost always the three show similar stats :P, maybe cuz traffis is not that heavy as of now.
@ Chris
yea there are so many ways to follow a website these days, but as my blog is still nascent there isn’t much trouble in tracking those, Rahul for sure can’t keep an eye on all the ways, the traffic is real large on his part as compared to me 😀
@Gaurav
Main difference is – feedburner tracks your RSS subscribers while other tracks traffic to your site
The feedburner pro features allow you to track visitors too. FeedFlare tracks all the visitors on the site. And I have been following their results for sometime now and they are identical, but the thing is that feedburner only dispays details of last 10 stats.
@Gaurav
Yep, but they rewrite feed URLs. I noticed duplicate links because of these URLs so I avoid it.
And when you have best Google Analytics with you, why use something else. 😉
technically more time you spend on analyzing your traffic, less time you will get to improve it!