Add to favorites in AWStats

[travelin cat]

I recently noticed one of the metrics tracked in AWStats is "Add to favorites" followed by "Estimate".

I'm assuming that this means that this is the estimated number of visitors that have bookmarked my site.

My question is how is that metric tracked?

[cgrantski]

There are a number of old posts here on that. I don't know if the method is still valid. Once upon a time, whenever IE 5.x or higher bookmarked something, IE would request favicon.ico - and this was the only time favicon.ico got requested by IE. So, you could estimate bookmarks by looking just at IE visits, counting the # of favicon.ico visits, dividing by the number of IE visits, then multiplying that ratio (% of IE visits that requested favicon) times the total for all visits. And you'd get an estimate.

I don't know what IE does any more regarding favicon.

[Megaclinium]

perhaps is tracking any visitor who goes directly to a non-root page without a referer. they would either have to type it in, select cached address or from favs. problem is I noticed some webmail services will also link directly to pages but not show referer. I sent out a newsletter with links and see those come in like that.

[cgrantski]

There are sooo many ways to be "without a referrer" that this won't work very well, although it sounds very good on paper.

[encyclo]

[awstats.sourceforge.net...]

Add To Favourites:
This value, available in the "miscellanous chart", reports an estimated indicator that can be used to have an idea 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 a referer field not defined, and with no 404 error code
y = Number of hits made by IE browsers for "/favicon.ico", with a referer field not defined, with or without 404 error code
r = Ratio of hits made by IE browsers compared to hits made by all browsers (r <= 1)

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 nearly ONLY when a user add the page to its favourites.

In other words, only slightly better than a tarot-reading ;) I wouldn't rely on the figure given for anything important. With newer IE versions which are likely to be fetching the favicon more frequently (in line with other browsers such as Firefox which fetch it every visit), then this indicator will become even less reliable.