does requesting an rss feed count as hits to a site?

Question

I have an iphone app which streams in a website/blogs rss feed.

Will each request from an app count as a hit to the website, or how can the users be counted, other than downloads?

Thanks

Answer 1

If your site contains the regular Google Analytics implementation, no, the RSS feed will not track views for you; it will not track requests from the app as a hit. The default installation does not insert any tracking code into the RSS feed.

You'll need to look into some sort of RSS feed analytics solution to track that. I'd recommend using Feedburner; I've seen good results for that.

You could also implement the iPhone iOS SDK for Google Analytics http://code.google.com/mobile/analytics/docs/iphone/ and track from within your application, but that's likely not possible if you're using a cookie cutter RSS feed to application tool.