How does AWStats estimate how many people have bookmarked my site?

[John]

I think I'm going to start tracking this myself.

 

[Ben]

You should, I have always wondered how accurate it was.

 

[John]

Yeah I have one site where it says almost 60% of my traffic is bookmarking my site, now I wish that were true but I have know it's not.

 

[arz]

RTFM.
AWStats Documentation - Glossary

It uses the number of times favicon.ico is downloaded. A few years ago, that used to be a fairly accurate measure but it no longer is today because IE6, IE7, and Firefox all seem to download that file automatically.

 

[John]

RTFM.
AWStats Documentation - Glossary

It uses the number of times favicon.ico is downloaded. A few years ago, that used to be a fairly accurate measure but it no longer is today because IE6, IE7, and Firefox all seem to download that file automatically.

thank you

+rep for you

 

[Stanley]

Are there alternative ways to track this?

 

[John]

I always have links like "bookmark us now" predominately displayed at the top of my sites, I was thinking about tracking how many clicks those links get.

 

[illusion]

I track my own bookmarks, and I can tell you, no where near what Awstats is, thanks arz for the link

 

[bobby]

method of tracking

You could always have an old hidden forum... that feeds to a cgi-script that redirects back to whatever page they were on.

Then use the javascript
window.external.AddFavorite(urlAddress,pageName)

and also have it submit the forum

document.myform.submit();

The cgi script can then write out a counter++; and then the date, and walla you have add to bookmark stats (too bad theres no way to track them doing using there browser gui.

 

[waz67]

You could always have an old hidden forum... that feeds to a cgi-script that redirects back to whatever page they were on.

That's soooooo web 1.0

Another way would be to use an AJAX call directly from your javascript bookmark-setting function to ping your page that does the counting. That way you don't have to do any redirecting of the user away from and back to whatever page they're on.