How to track traffic in Google Analytics from Apple News rss feed?

Question

I am trying to track traffic coming from Apple News through Google Analytics, submit in RSS format. After online search I found that only if it's submitted in Apple New format. And that RSS feed is unreliable to track with GA.

Is there any other way to do this?

Answer 1

The first link you provided shows that the browser dimension is set as AppleNews for those visitors (I've never used Apple News before, but I'm guessing it's an in-app browser).

This gives you a few options:

• Use a secondary dimension of Browser with an advanced search for AppleNews in your Acquisition report.
• Create a segment where the Browser matches AppleNews to make it available for all reports.
• Create a find/replace filter when the Browser matches AppleNews to change the acquisition data itself (source/medium). You'll want to be careful with his because it permanently alters your data!

The other thought I had is that maybe it's possible to use UTM query strings only when submitting to RSS? If the data is scraping your website you could programmatically update the RSS URL to include UTM parameters to track the source/medium that way (this may have varying success because of other scrapers outside of Apple News).

If you manually submit to Apple News, you could manually UTM tag your URLs so the source/medium is forced to Apple News.