Comments on: 170% Bookmark Rate – How Does That Happen?

By: Dani

Dani — Mon, 05 Jun 2006 18:12:38 +0000

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?

By: Peter Cooper

Peter Cooper — Thu, 01 Jun 2006 18:14:04 +0000

Only certain browsers get the favicon.ico in that way, btw, so it wouldn’t correlate with pages.

By: Terry

Terry — Thu, 01 Jun 2006 13:04:46 +0000

Thanks for the help Paul, here are updated numbers and I’ll include the page visit count this time:

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.

By: Paul

Paul — Thu, 01 Jun 2006 12:31:29 +0000

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…