Set as Homepage

How many people set your site as their Homepage?

[FrankWeb]

You can track how many people added your site to their favorites by uploading the favicon.ico, but how can you track the amount of people that set your site as their homepage?

Does anybody know if you can filter this out of your log file, or any other way?

[jatar_k]

I don't think you can actually. I don't think it makes any special type of request when it is the homepage, just no referrer.

maybe someone has more insight but I don't personally know of a way.

[JimThomason]

I had this same question.

We came up with putting a javascript on our sites "Click here to set as homepage".

This click here is linked to homepage2.cgi which is just a redirect to our index page. The value that is used to set thier homepage is homepage.cgi which is just another redirect to our index.

Stats on homepage2.cgi shows us how many visitors set our page as their homepage each day and homepage.cgi shows us how many people visit the site each day through thier homepage.

We did the same thing with the "click here to bookmark". The value for setting the bookmark is bookmark.cgi. Another redirect to index.php. Not as effective as homepage.cgi though as people are familiar with using their bookmark options in their browser.

If anyone has any better way of tracking this I'm open to them.

Jim

[mack]

use the JS to point to domain.com/1 then have domain .com/1 redirect through htaccess to the real homepage. that way you can count the referers that come in as /1 but the user is none the wiser because htaccess redirection is usualy very fast.

[JimThomason]

Would redirects in htaccess show up in stats program like urchin?

[mack]

Im not 100% that they will show up at all. I just got to thinking about it after I made that post. It is possible that the server will just redirect the hit before there is any form of request to the documents area of the web server using mod_rewrite.

I have however set it up and will report back if it works. I am using webalizer.

[LogFan]

The solutions proposed here are very interesting. However, they have an impact only from the day they are implemented, of course. It still poses the problem, especially when you want to analyze the past, which is the case of many new comers to Web analytics. True, that number is buried somewhere in the No Referrer.

[JimThomason]

I agree LogFan. I was just asked a few months a go to start analyzing our logs and after reading a few posts here it became clear that the "no referrer" results seem somewhat useless.

[webmasterworld.com ]

I mainly came up with these ideas for the future instead of help with the past. We plan to use this method in every area we can.

Bookmarkers - bookmark.cgi
Homepage - homepage.cgi
Emails - email.cgi
etc. PHP will be used eventually.

Click through tracking using php and mysql is another area we plan to start doing which came somewhat from this same topic.