Blog Tipz

The transition is now underway. You have to make the transition from the FeedBurner(.com) site to the Google-powered version, appropriately located at feedburner.google.com by February 28th, 2009. If you do not do so, the process could be “automated” for you or you will risk losing your feed (which would include subscribers if you are using FeedBurner as your default tracking/management tool). However, the process of migration is rather basic and won’t require more than a few minutes should everything work properly.

Reason Behind the Migration

Google purchased FeedBurner nearly a year and a half ago and was planning on making the migration to its own system (albeit there are a lot of similarities). Last summer, some of the publishers began making the switch, especially those that were planning on monetizing their feeds through AdSense.

Now, it it time that all members and users of the system move their accounts (much of the data has already been moved to Google servers).

To do this, login to your FeedBurner account. As in my case, a screen will display, notifying you that the change is necessary. Click the link to transfer your account, then make sure all your account details/feeds are in order. Please be aware that the best solution would be to stick with a Google Account, as it is one less log-in to remember. Within a few seconds, the process is complete and you’ll notice a few minor changes.

First of all, there are improved statistics. Within the 30-day view, you can now see daily subscriber totals (in green), daily reach totals (in blue), and the relationship between these two numbers over time. Hopefully more users are given “accurate” statistics, as was a common complaint with the old, FeedBurner version.

This feature will ultimately allow publishers to understand the relationship between views and clicks, helping you take action, how likely people are to view your current and previous updates with full text (due to post frequency), and spikes in traffic/subscribers due to new posts.

Other improvements include increased reliability and delivery to scale, with the service hosted on similar networks/servers as Gmail and other services; robust subscriber list search and pagination to help you organize and track who is subscribed to your blog by email address through use of search. Plus, you can export a complete subscriber list through a CSV-formatted text file.

Another change I saw was in the display of feeds. Everything has been removed – in a good way. Google simplified the view, as there are no longer extra buttons next to each feed.

Negative Aspects

When I made the migration to the new service/URL, my feed levels to some of my blogs decreased, but overall, they remained the same. Other users have reported similar drops, so I assume that they will return in due time. However, you have to make the migration, so this is a factor that has to be overlooked.

A Few FAQs

Will I lose all my subscribers in this process?

No, all feeds.feedburner.com URLs will redirect your readers to feeds hosted by Google, so they will continue to receive your feeds. There may be changes in the number of subscribers as well as for stats. Generally, they will become more accurate and up-to-date than the previous algorithms.

Changes will have to be made if you use the MyBrand service.

Bloggers and publishers who used the MyBrand service, which allowed you to map a domain to your feed will have to change the DNS CNAME to the Google-hosted domain service. No longer will the CNAME be the same domain as the domain that serves feeds, but the service level and functionality will be nearly identical.

Google Account/AdSense

The main reason Google is making the switch is to consolidate the two businesses – feeds and ads (previously served through FeedBurner > now through Google AdSense). You can log into your account through the new Google URL, configure ads through the AdSense management area, or use the previous feedburner.com site with your old account, although it will redirect to the new Google-hosted area.

Retired Features

Two features, Site Stats and FeedBurner Networks will be discontinued, which makes sense since they will no longer be supporting the previous ad platform nor stats (there are plenty of other options, including Google Analytics).

More information:

• Transferring FeedBurner Accounts to Google Accounts FAQ [FeedBurner Help]
• Transferring Feeds Between Accounts
• AdSense for Feeds Blog