170% Bookmark Rate - How Does That Happen?
Something I can’t figure out and thought I’d post about it here in case anyone else has come across this.
I have a website that for the past several months has been over 100% for bookmarks. I don’t get it. I mean my eyebrows raised when it was 40%-50%, but over a 100%?
Stats from the other day:
Add to Favorites (estimated): 3116 / 1836 Visitors 169.7 %
Is this from scrapers or something? Can scrapers add a page to favorites? Who/what/how does this happen?
Stats are server based, AWSTATS. I have an addon domain that’s not wonky like this with the numbers, everything looks normal there (same host, same AWSTATS).
Any feedback on this would be appreciated :).
Paul:
June 1st, 2006 at 6:31 am
This might be nonsense: I think that awstats calculates estimated bookmarks by counting the number of times that favicon.ico is accessed. In the olden days favicon.ico was only usually retrieved when a bookmark was added, now however many browsers retrieve favicon.ico on every page access and display it in the address bar. This leads to a hugely distorted figure. I can’t explain differences between sites however other than to suggest that it might be due to demographics with one site attracting mor etech savvy users with more up to date browsers, or more skew towards firefox or something…
Terry:
June 1st, 2006 at 7:04 am
Unique: 1952
Number of Visits: 3941
Pages: 16089
Now for the favorites numbers:
Add to favorites (estimated) 3404 / 1952 Visitors 174.3 %
***
If it was the favicon count that gets downloaded per page, wouldn’t the bookmark rate then be 16089 / 1952 (16089 being the viewed page count)?
Or hmmmm. Maybe out of those 16,089 page views, only a % of those use browsers that download the favicon for every page and that’s why the disparity in numbers?
I think you could be right and that’s what’s happening.
But now I’m depressed! (;))
A small aff site of mine is getting about 800-900 shoppers bookmarking a month and that could very well be from only 25 or 50 people instead of hundreds of shoppers like I thought!
If anyone has further input or feedback - fire away please.
Peter Cooper:
June 1st, 2006 at 12:14 pm
Only certain browsers get the favicon.ico in that way, btw, so it wouldn’t correlate with pages.
Dani:
June 5th, 2006 at 12:12 pm
The only thing I can think of is: does AwStats count multiple bookmarks to the same site?
Even so, it would be bizarre if all the visitors to this one site were making multiple bookmarks. But who knows how scraper software works, and how AwStats interprets it?