RSS 2.0Quick Answer:
A quote from the AWStats glossary:
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. The other browsers make often 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.
Note that this number is just an indicator that is in most case higher than true value. The reason is that even IE browser sometimes make hit on favicon without an "Add to favourites" action by a user.
AWStats is a free website traffic analyizer that I use to look at who comes here and why. It has a section shown below that claims to tell me who has bookmarked my site:
And I was just curious how on earth they can know that.
Anyway now you have your answer, and here are the searches I did that indirectly got me to the glossary eventually:
- “Add to favorites (estimated)” how does it work?
- Add to favorites (estimated) how does it work?
Tags: AWStats, Add To Favorites, Website Analytics
Posted by Greg Pinero (Primary Searcher) in WordPress, Other