Reclaiming a feed set up by another agency

[Rob Short]

I work at a marketing agency and we have recently won a social media and blogging contract with one of our existing clients. As part of this, we need to monitor the RSS stats, which should be accessible through Feedburner. As the feed is integrated with Wordpress, I have got the name of the feed from the WP admin.

However, we do not have the access details for the Feedburner account, as it was set up by another agency quite some time ago. Myself (and our client) have chased up all the agencies that have had anything to do with the web side of things, and no one knows anything about the Feedburner account.

So, basically, the website is using a RSS feed which we can't manage! Is there any way I can move the feed to a new account and manage it from there? Or, can I contact Google/Feedburner and ask them to migrate the feed from whichever account it is associated with to a new one?

The only other option available would be to create a new feed with a new account. However, this would affect any of the people who are subscribed to the existing feed. Is there any way of redirecting/merging an old feed to a new one, so we don't lose the subscribers?

This is causing us a lot of headaches, so any advice would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks,

Rob

[PeggyK]

Unfortunately the only way to manage or move a feed is from inside Feedburner, and there is no way to recover access to a Feedburner account from the name of the feed.

Is the feed showing AdSense ads? If that's the case, Feedburner has to be managed through the same Google account as AdSense.

[Rob Short]

Hi Peggy,

Thanks for replying so quickly.

I don't think that it shows AdSense ads - it looks like a clean feed to me. Is there any way of checking?

I did read something about advert (networks?) being able to migrate, unfortunately this is just a straightforward feedburner feed!

So in order to actually access the feed I will need to find some sort of email address linked to the account. Do you know of any support address for Google/Feedburner? It would actually help if they could just give us a name, because then I can get in touch with the right agency!

Cheers,

Rob

[PeggyK]

If it were showing your ads, you should see some data for the feed in your AdSense account. If you don't see any such data (or don't have an AdSense account) then the feed probably isn't monetized.

There isn't any direct support for Feedburner.   There are the help articles and this user-to-user forum. 

So that means what you're stuck with is me giving you my best (educated) guess: you'll have to figure out the email associated with the Feedburner account.  Once you figure that out, you can go through the Google account recovery process to reset the associated password and gain access to the account. 

I don't think it would hurt to guess what the email might be  through trial and error, if you've narrowed down the possibilities.

Is the feed being sent out as an email as well? The "from" email address might give you a hint.

[Rob Short]

Yeah - I've read that there's no direct contact for Feedburner, which is pretty rubbish if you ask me! Thank you for your assistance with this though, really appreciate it.

The problem is the RSS feed started 3 years ago and nobody has any recollection of who set it up. Good idea about subscribing via email, however, doesn't narrow it down. The feed is updated by several users on their Wordpress, so the author title is simply the Wordpress user. I've tried a few email addresses and nothing comes through.

Would there be anything in the HTML code for the feed which might give any clues? I've tried the URI name, that doesn't work.

Also, the feed itself appears as a basic RSS feed, not the full Feedburner feed. By this I mean, when using Firefox, it has the "Subscribe to this feed using..", then giving the options such as Live Bookmarks. By a full Feedburner feed, I mean something like our own blog: http://feeds.feedburner.com/SmartMonkeyMarketing

The reason I bring that up is I'm wondering if that has any difference on being able to access it? I vaguely remember when we set up our own Feedburner account that we could choose how the feed would appear (Feedburner, xml etc).

[santos kumar jha]

[Rob Short]

Okeydokey, I've just chased up another agency and they have given the access details. It seems one of the other agencies had forgotten about it....not very helpful.

Thanks again for your advice, Peggy. Hopefully some of the issues raised here and your advice will help others in a similar boat.

Rob

[PeggyK]

Glad you found someone with the information.