How to Migrate Feedburner Feeds to Google Adsense

Google’s acquired Feedburner back in June of 2007. Feedburner has since been integrated into the Google Adsense platform. Bloggers can now place adsense units into their RSS feeds. In order to take advantage of of this service I needed to migrate my three Feedburner feeds into the new Google adsense feeds system.

According to this Google/Feedburner FAQ, February 28, 2009 is the deadline to migrate feeds. After that users will no longer be able to access their Feedburner accounts.

The migration process is simple for regular Feedburner users.

I use the MyBrand service – see my earlier ‘Google Turned Feedburner into ‘Free’burner Without My Knowledge’ post.   A few more steps are required to migrate MyBrand feeds.

General Migration Steps

You can initiate the migration process from inside of Google Adsense or Feedburner. I initiated the transfer from within Adsense.

Note: You’ll need to set up an adsense account before you initiate the migration.

• Click on this link to begin: ‘Move feeds to your Google Account’.
• Enter your Feedburner credentials into the following dialogue box:

  

• Click on the ‘Next’ button.
• The next page provides a list of your Feedburner feeds. Click the ‘Next’ button to complete the migration. Regrettably I didn’t get a screen shot of that page.
• For simple Feedburner feeds (ie: for those not using MyBrand) that’s it, your job is done – you’ll see the following ‘success’ screen (click on the image for larger view):

  

Additional ‘MyBrand’ Migration Steps

As you can see fro the ‘Important!’ paragraph above, there are a few more steps involved to finalize a ‘MyBrand’ migration:

• On the ‘Success!’ page above, click on blue
  
       http://feedburner.google.com/fb/a/mybrand 

  link to jump to the MyBrand migration instruction page. It looks like this (click image for larger view):

  

• Essentially these instructions tell you to change the CNAME alias you setup within your site’s DNS records when you first activated the MyBrand service.
• Specifically you change the alias from a Feedburner-specific alias to a Google-specific alias.
• The alias you’ll need to use is highlighted in yellow on the instruction page (see above).
• DynDNS is my DNS Service provider. For The Daleisphere, all I had to do was enter the alias highlighted in yellow above into the ‘Alias to:’ field for my feeds.daleisphere.com hostname as pictured below: 

See also: Instructions on how to adjust CNAME records on other DNS services

• Save Changes and Repeat for each feed.
• That’s it!

When logged into your adsense account, click on this Feedburner-within-Google link to access your feed information in the same way you did on Feedburner. My Feedburner page after migration looked like this (click image for larger view):

Note: The highlighted yellow text at the top that warns:

”Your feed stats might be low for a bit; they should return to former levels in about 72 hours”

Known MyBrand Migration 404 Problem

Some users have had problems with the MyBrand migration not taking. See here and here. I had the same problem initially. Here’s the solution:

• Sign in to feedburner.google.com
• click ‘My Account ‘ (top left)
• click the MyBrand option
• click the ‘Deactivate’ button on the bottom right of the page.

• Note: Do not remove feeds and click the ‘Save’ button on the bottom left as some have suggested.

Re-enter the domain(s) you deactivated in the previous step and then
click the ‘Activate’ button.

The feed(s) that were showing 404 should be working now.

Reference

• Transferring FeedBurner Accounts to Google Accounts FAQ
• MyBrand Tech Support FAQ

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