I’ve been doing a lot of work measuring RSS Feeds.  There’s no Analytics package, out of the box, that does a good job tracking RSS traffic; perhaps because RSS is an asynchronous protocol (stateless) - actually not sure I understand that fully - What can be measured today with analytics packages currently on the market?

1. RSS Reader Traffic - RSS pings and and page loads of XML files can be measured .

2. Page-views of XML feed items via tagging of URLs embedded in the XML feed - IE: you create a tag called "rss" and add it to your URLs - that gives you a way to tell a page was accessed because of the RSS Feed vs. getting to the page some other pathway (direct link, website referral, search engine result).

3. Bytes downloaded - useful for Audio and Video file downloads (IE: MP3 files, any video file, etc).

4. Traffic and search engine referrals to a URL (encapsulated in an RSS Feed).

5. Customized feeds generated with a CMS can count subscribers but it’s a lot of work and overhead to create and uniquely tag a customized feed for every subscriber.

Off the top of my head, that’s about it.   That means, you can not tell how many subscribers you have and you probably can’t yet tell how many times your podcast was download and listened to (though Audible is coming up with a platform to do this - but it’s hardly a standard yet).

Decision Makers want to know how many subscribers you’ve got….and truth being told - you can’t tell them - but you may be much closer to that if your XML feed is hosted using FeedBurner.

Here’s a good post about some of the advanced stats you can get for your XML RSS Feed from FeedBurner.