Announcing a new Google feature on your company blog before Google announces it? If me or one of my colleagues tried to do this on purpose, it would most likely not work. Of course, we all make observations about certain things we notice with the Search Engines, but to actually make an announcement ahead of the company who introduced the feature… well, it must take something.

But there it is, right in front of our eyes: Lakestar Media announces “Map Overlay” feature in FeedBurner two days (!) ahead of FeedBurner’s blog. FeedBurner’s post confirms all the observations made on our blog.

Announcing Map Overlay on the Company Blog

Map Overlay post on Google FeedBurner blog

One thing I cannot help taking a small issue with is the one in this citation:

“Hopefully, you will be able to use these data to better tailor content to your readership, and target lackluster markets. If you are one of our publishers who sells your own ads in feeds using Google Ad Manager, this will help you better target your subscribers“.

All this is good, but let’s have a look at “exact number of item views” metrics. We use several services to deliver our RSS feed to subscribers, and FeedBurner’s dealing with numbers never ceases to bewilder me. So the question is – what IS the “exact number of item views“? Are they the unique views? It is important to know which of your items your readers find interesting, but if they return to certain items during the day, then “unique views” evidently do not correlate with the number of subscribers. According to the screengrab I took on 12 June, we had 66 views of items on our feed – but the number is much lower if we look at the graph in Aggregate Item Views pane:

Most recent visitors in Google FeedBurner

Another question is – what is “the most recent full day“? The question is especially valid since FeedBurner experiences delays in reporting once in a while. Just for the purpose of not focusing too tightly on 12 June, I added the statistics for 11 June to the screen grab – but it is still much lower than 66 views we had according to Map Overlay. And finally, “clicks back to the site” are often not registered by Analytics.

Aggregate Item Use feature in Google FeedBurner

These issues are not raised by a die-hard geek who always seems to see the bigger picture behind any service or analytical package they come across, and thus is never satisfied. And at any rate, both Google and FeedBurner have been around for long enough to have heard that there are problems their services are not addressing. But, by the look of things, Google is more concerned about Bing than the incongruities in its data analysis services.

I was somewhat critical of the changes that occured to FeedBurner since it was completely migrated over to Google. Some features, however, were “tweaked”. There was a chance previously to see the countries and cities that sent visits to the site and feed. The site statistics in FeedBurner has now been disabled, but the feed statistics got a Google Analytics makeover. You’re now being served a Map Overlay of your visitors for the most recent full day, so see screen grab below for an example. Unfortunately, there it ends.

Map Overlay feature in Google FeedBurner

We have just debuted on SlideShare (find us and fave us), and we hope to make our contribution to the community a valuable one. So, we started by analysing blog queries and found out that quite a few people were wondering about how to add RSS feeds from external blogs to Facebook pages. We seized the opportunity to tell you about our experience, and thus our first presentation is just this – “How to add RSS feeds to your Facebook page”. The good thing about it is that we first considered simply inserting images into the post, but then we remembered about the pretty document sharing service we have already profiled previously. The presentation has only got 8 slides, but is a quick guide to using Notes application, to get external RSS feeds delivered to your Facebook page and displayed in the page’s profile. The same process is true for adding an external RSS feed to a personal profile on Facebook, so it suffices to say that the presentation will stand true for both business and individual users.

What we are certainly glad to say is that this presentation alone highlights many more subjects that we could cover for you, so we will continue doing just that. In the meantime, we wish a happy Labour Day to all who celebrates it elsewhere on the planet – and a good Bank Holiday Monday to our UK visitors, readers, and colleagues.