Just Curious

[Virtual Imager]

Does anyone know how awstats estimates the number of visitors who have bookmarked your site?

[TCH-Bruce]

From the www.awstats.org glossary page

 

Add To Favourites:

This value, available in the "miscellanous chart", reports an estimated value of the number of times a visitor has added your web site into its favourite bookmarks.

The technical rules for that is the following formula:

Number of Add to Favourites = round((x+y) / r)

where

x = Number of hits made by IE browsers for "/anydir/favicon.ico" with no 404 error

y = Number of hits made by IE browsers for "/favicon.ico" (with or without 404 error)

r = Ratio of hits made by IE browsers compared to hits made by all browsers (r

 

As you can see in formula, only IE is used to count reliable "add", the "Add to favourites" for other browsers are estimated using ratio of other browsers usage compared to ratio of IE usage. The reason is that only IE do a hit on favicon.ico ONLY when a user add the page to its favourites. The other browsers make hits on this file also for other reasons so we can't count one "hit" as one "add" since it might be a hit for another reason.

AWStats differentiate also hits with error and not to avoid counting multiple hits made recursively in upper path when favicon.ico file is not found in deeper directory of path.

 

Hope that helps.

[Virtual Imager]

Yes... thank you very much! Question: would you say that the estimate is reliable? Do you think it errs high or low?

 

Rock Sign

 

VI

[TCH-Bruce]

Since it can only count IE accurately you would have to compare the percentage of viewers you have using IE versus other browsers. If most of your viewers are using IE I would think it would be a pretty reliable figure.

 

Of course this is just my thought.

[Virtual Imager]

That's great! 85% of my hits are IE users... Thanks, I think I have a feel for it now.

 

VI