Email marketers have a big problem. HTML email is a better marketing medium and is more trackable than text email. This is because remote content such as images can be loaded as the email is opened and used to monitor impressions. Even if payment is for clicks and these are tracked, the impressions to conversion ratio is a must have.
Unfortunately, email clients are soon going to block dynamic content in email making it impossible to track impressions directly. This, coupled with the fact that up to 40% of HTML email doesn’t get to its destination because of spam filters, has lead people to look to RSS as a possible savior for email marketing.
Aside from the fact that RSS (as implemented currently) is not as good a medium for ads. If RSS is to be successful it needs to be trackable. This means tracking clicks and impressions.
At first glance the article below seems to offer this:
“When you open up the feed we know it. Every time you refresh the feed we count it”
Clickthroughs are simple, however, I don’t believe that IMN offer real impressions tracking. The reason is that RSS clients are like search engine crawlers that offer cached results. You don’t know whether it is an unread feed pulled by a piece of software, that registers an RSS ‘pageview’ in your stats, or a genuine pageview by a human.