If a certain lack of variety has weighed on the format of your day-to-day, feed-to-email deliveries, things are looking up at last. Recent advances in dollar-sign technology have brought some strange and fascinating new capabilities to the Email Branding section of FeedBurner's Email Subscriptions feature. Read on, ostensibly for the many useful pictures and descriptions, but really for the danger and excitement only a new checkbox can bring.

First, sign in to your Google Account on FeedBurner and then click your feed's title, then Publicize > Email Subscriptions > Email Branding.



Always want to feature the title of the latest post in your subject line? Just put ${latestItemTitle} in the Email Subject/Title textbox:



Do you often have more than one post per day? You can help your readers uncover exactly how many new missives you've got planned for them in each update. Check the "Change Subject…" box and reveal a secondary subject line to use when 2 or more feed posts are delivered in a single email.

Remember, good subject lines command attention in crowded inboxes.

Behold! The mythical "almost empty" inbox. But in this case, the most recent post's subject line, thanks to ${latestItemTitle}, is right in this FeedBurner-delivered email, shining through.

Have fun with this new feature, but please note that ${pithyRetort}, ${iambicPentameter}, and ${heartfeltApology} are not yet supported.

Posted by Paul Darga and Matt Shobe, FeedBurner Team

One of the most compelling reasons that publishers choose FeedBurner is that it gives them the tools to record and analyze how many users are consuming their content. Late last week, we launched an enhancement to our item statistics that enables publishers to get a bit more information about those users. Similar to the feature by the same name in Google Analytics, the "Map Overlay" page provides a breakdown of the previous day's item statistics from a geographic perspective.

For feeds with item stats enabled, clicking on the "Map Overlay" item from feedburner.google.com will bring you the page. From your AdSense account, click on Manage Ads and then on "View Feed Stats" for the feed whose map you wish to view.

At the top, you'll find a world map visualization that shows countries with more item views as more intense shades of green.

Hovering over a country shows the name of the country and the exact number of item views.

Below the map is a table, which lists the top 25 countries by number of item views.

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. Or, just reveling in the world-wide reach of a feed is pretty satisfying too.

And remember, it's important that you follow our instructions to make sure you are directing all your traffic to FeedBurner.

Posted by Greg Kick, FeedBurner Engineering Team

One of the most popular (and recurring) questions our publishers ask is, "How do I maximize revenue for AdSense for feeds and ensure my subscriber stats are as accurate as possible?" Some of you can recite the answers to these questions backwards and forwards (though we find typing it backwards is quite difficult, so we'll leave you to say that aloud). But for our many new publishers that are just tuning in, here's the recap.


Just setting up AdSense for feeds ad units in your AdSense account is not enough to start seeing traffic and revenue to your feeds. It's critical that 100% of your feed traffic be directed to the feed(s) you created in AdSense for feeds or your FeedBurner account. Luckily, this is fairly easy to do via two standard methods.

1. Redirect your original feed. This is the recommended option for all publishers, but especially if you have an already established blog or feed that already has subscribers. This option ensures that all traffic gets funneled to the version that has both advertising and subscriber tracking enabled. We've detailed this process in this Help Center entry.
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   An added bonus: a plugin for self-hosted WordPress installations and feed-specific features within Blogger and TypePad make redirection much easier on these two publishing platforms.
   
   


2. Promote your feeds.feedburner.com feed. This is recommended only in the cases where you are setting up a new blog, or have an existing blog or feed that has no traffic. For example, if your feed is found at http://feeds.feedburner.com/toastforbreakfast, you would change your blog template to link only to this version of the feed. Note you have to make sure to change it not only where you promote your feed directly, but also everywhere you have feed autodiscovery links in your template. (One other place to keep in mind: BrowserFriendly.)
   

Hopefully, this reminder will help everyone get on firm ground with how to maximize traffic to their feed and revenue from it, too. In future posts, we will be covering how to increase traffic and subscribers to your feed, so hang on to your hat!


Posted by Steve Olechowski - Product Manager, AdSense for feeds

Along with the clarification regarding the doubleclick.net domain we posted a few weeks ago over at Inside AdSense, we thought we would mention that we have made similar changes to the AdSense for feeds ad tags that are being placed in feeds. By changing our ad serving to the doubleclick.net domain, we are now allowing advertisers to more easily create campaigns that span all media platform types on the Google Content Network, including sites, feeds, and mobile.

In addition to being able to target feeds with Placement Targeting and Contextual Targeting, which have always been supported, this change will soon allow advertisers to target feed users using Interest Based Advertising across both sites and feeds.

By making it easier for advertisers to buy ads in your feeds, and by supporting the exact same features and ad formats that are accepted on websites, the competition for your ad space should increase to help ensure that you're maximizing your earnings potential.

Posted by Steve Olechowski - Product Manager, AdSense for feeds

As feed consumption continues to grow, many or our publishers are adding more and more feeds to their Google accounts, and wishing to analyze, publicize, and monetize those feeds through the combination of AdSense for feeds and FeedBurner. Because of this trend, one of the most frequent questions we receive is "How do I export stats for all my feeds at once?"

As of today, you can now export your subscriber, reach, hits, item click-throughs, podcast downloads, and item views directly from the FeedBurner application on the My Feeds page. You are then at your leisure to slice, dice, add, subtract, and even multiply and divide your stats however you may wish.

As always, aggregate revenue, impressions, and clicks, and eCPM can be downloaded from your AdSense account or Google Ad Manager account (if you have been enabled to sell your own direct ads in feeds through Google Ad Manager) on the Reports tabs.

Also, as a reminder - if you wish to export feed subscriber statistics in timeframes other than those provided, you can do that through the FeedBurner Awareness API.

Posted by Steve Olechowski, Google Product Managment

Over the last week, and as reported in the FeedBurner status blog , we experienced a technical issue that caused us to report reduced subscribers from Google Feedfetcher in your feed analytics at FeedBurner and AdSense.

Our engineers have resolved the issue, and been able to rebuild stats from our logs such that the totals should now be correct. Please note that in the past, we were not able to correct historical statistical anomalies, but are now able to do so, always using the actual traffic data.

No data was lost during this process, nor were any subscribers actually unsubscribed from your feed. All feed content was delivered to all subscribers who wished to view the content, regardless of the numbers reported. Ad impression reporting and revenue were unaffected by these subscriber reporting issues.

We apologize for the inconvenience and appreciate your patience as we continue to merge our systems with other Google systems behind the scenes.



Posted by Steve Olechowski, Google Product Management

As we detailed in our previous installment, More details on moving to a Google account, if you used the MyBrand service at feedburner.com — our service that allows you to use a custom domain with your feed — you must move to a Google account and update your DNS CNAME records by March 16, 2009, or else your MyBrand URLs will return a 404 "page not found" error.

It's important to note that it is not enough to just sign in with a Google account and request to move your account if you use MyBrand. Even if your MyBrand-ed URLs have continued to work after you have completed your move, they will cease to work on March 16, 2009 if you have not changed your DNS CNAME.

If you plan to continue to use MyBrand, you can find detailed instructions for changing your CNAME when you are signed into FeedBurner in the My Account > MyBrand section. If you haven't already moved from feedburner.com to a Google Account, please sign in to your account and follow the guided steps to complete this move. Here's a quick preview of those steps (click to zoom in):

(In the image above, you'll see the phrase {YOUR_CODE} in the instructions. This is replaced by an address that is specific to your Google Account available on the aforementioned MyBrand page; you need to use that address to update MyBrand correctly.)

If you have any questions about this transfer process, please refer to the FeedBurner Help Center entry “Transferring FeedBurner Accounts to Google Accounts FAQ” for additional details.