On July 11th, Google’s Blogger announced a deceptively minor update that allowed users to reference a 3rd party feed for their blog. For veteran Blogger users the importance of this update may be obvious but for others let me explain.
Then: Blogger only had its own feed type which meant that users of Feedburner or other 3rd party feed trackers had to include two feeds on their blog – one being their 3rd party service and the other being the Google service. The result was that some visitors who subscribed to their blog could have subscribed to the Google feed rather than the preferred 3rd party feed. This meant the actual subscriber base for a blog would be inaccurate (lower than it actually is) because the 3rd party feed is the feed being measured.
Now: Blogger has made it extremely simple to set the default feed from its own atom.xml feed to that of a 3rd party URL. As a result, new subscribers have only one feed to pick from and your feed tracking stats will be far more accurate.
Why is Consolidating a Feed So Important?
More accurate stats equals more accurate marketing decisions. For example it is beneficial to see which blog posts have done better than others so that you can make a mental note to write similar articles in the future OR to expand on the successful article.