I was just going through the stats of my new directory. It's only been live for three days now, had around 170 visitors, but the "add to favourites" rate is 135% per "unique" visitor. I have another site: New Zealand Photography which I feel is a niche site and so the 60% rate (for unique visitors) for that site doesn't surprise me much. But, a rate over 100% means that some people are bookmarking more than one page, right? This might make sense if people are adding the home page as well as the page that their listing appears on to their favourites. Is this normal for a directory? Or, am I missing something?
Oh, the percentage of people who add your site to their favourites folder or bookmark your site. I get this in my stats as a standard statistic.
I don't think there's a way to tell if a person visits your site using a bookmark. Most likely your "bookmark rate" simply reflects requests without a referrer, which would be all search engines and whoever blocks referrers (Norton AV does this) or simply typed your URL manually. J.D.
No, the bookmark/direct referrals are separate (Around 23%). They can never be over 100%!! This is separate. This is the number of people who have bookmarked the site after visiting it.
The only reason I could think of for a high number of people adding my site to their favourites was that maybe they liked the site and have bookmarked it so that they can submit their listing in the future when the directory's PageRanked.
I understand that. I have scanned my own sites and found my add to favorites bloated afterwards. If I scan from different ips; it's gonna count for 1 bookmark. If someone has a scanner setup to scan from a hundred different ips; you're going to get 100 add to favourites for that. Simply running xenu adds an add to favorites. I know. I've looked
Huh? I'm sorry that totally went over my head!! I'm fairly techno savvy, but could you explain that in plain english?? J.D: I get different stats that look something like this: Total visits: 120 Total unique visits: 100 Direct visits/Bookmarks: 30 (30%) Referrals from other sites: 10 (10%) Search Engines: 30 (30%) Referrals from internal pages: 30 (30%) Add to Favourites: 143/100 (143%) i.e.: Out of the 100 unique visitors that came to my sites, my site was "added to favourites" 143 times.
But the add to favorites number is estimated. There is no way to tell if they really did or not. Josh
when someone visits my site and selects add to favouries...their browser calls for the 'favicon'. as i dont have a favicon..it gives me an error..which shows on my stats. So i know more or less how many have added it to their favourites. Of course you never know how many deleted it the next day
I had a thing recently with requests for the Favicon icon. Is that how the favoirites thing is calculated? Turns out that some browsers request the Favicon icon every page they visit. Firefox may be one. I have a suspicion that Safari (Mac) might be another.
Not quite true. FF always requests favicon and IE only requests it if the URL is already in the favorites and it does it once in a while (depending on your caching setting). J.D.
These numbers don't add up. Never mind unique visits - the percentages apply to all visits; for example, somebody may visit your site following a link and then in an hour by typing the URL, which would be 2 visits, each falling into their own category. However, 30+10+30+30 is only 100, not 120, as it should be. J.D.
Those aren't real figures. I made them up to tell you what stats I get. And, you're right .... they should all be 30! But, please focus on the real issue! The "Add to Favourite" stats are separate from the direct/bookmark visitors. vord: I am not sure how this stat is calculated but I get around an average of 14 page views per visit. So, my "Add to Favourites" would have been quite high if the favicon was being requested on each page.
All I'm saying is that technically it is impossible to tell whether a visitor used a bookmark or just typed the URL manually. So, don't put too much faith in what your stats tool tells you regarding bookmarks. J.D.