Awstats stat question

I am really not sure where this should go, but since it is related to traffic, so I posted in the general marketing area....

In the awstats under Miscellaneous there is a stat that tells you how many people add your website to their bookmark. My question is, is that stat reliable?

For one of my sites, I have 1159 / 1078 Visitors 107.5 % which doesn't seem right, what exactly does that stat indicate?

 

I doubt it is reliable as there is no real way for it to know who is adding your site to their bookmarks. It might be a metric calculated/fudged on the number of requests for favicon.ico.

 

AWStats compares the number of hits on favicon.ico from IE users to the total number of IE users.

It was working pretty well, but this method has been "sabotaged" by the last release of the Google Toolbar that frantically hits the favicon.ico file.

I have written a short patch to eliminate the Google Toolbar effect and get more realistic results of this AWStats favorites number.

Jean-Luc

 

firefox hits the favico everytime you focus on a tab
so its pretty useless

 

Not really.

Hits from Firefox browsers are not counted. The estimate is based on what IE users do.

Jean-Luc

 

which I'd think makes it even more useless
especially if you have a techie site where most of your
visitors are using ff

 

there was a thread about this somewhere on the forum.

but its just an average guess i think, based on the amount of visitors that get to your site via a direct link (ie bookmark), but some firewalls block refferer info so it would make it look like the visitor is coming from a direct link when they are not.