I want to make stats for my website. One thing I want to do is to know how many people bookmark my website. What's the best way to do that without a survey?
+9
A:
There is no way to tell.
A proportion of people who arrive at the page without sending referer information will have bookmarked it — but they might also have come from a link in an email, typed the URL, dragged it from their history, turned referers off, etc, etc,etc.
David Dorward
2009-09-08 12:08:27
+3
A:
Your best bet is to have a Javascript "Bookmark us" link that bookmarks the site and makes an AJAX call to a backend script to store info about a new bookmark in your db. This won't catch people who bookmark your site directly using their browser, but it will give you some idea about the stickiness of your site.
code_burgar
2009-09-08 12:08:28
Don't do that ... it's annoying as hell.
Pop Catalin
2009-09-08 12:09:41
I'm always pretty suspicious of such a link, so I suspect the numbers will be fairly inaccurate. Though I agree it is the only way to tell if anyone bookmarks.
Richbits
2009-09-08 12:10:58
that is so 1997...
Natrium
2009-09-08 12:12:11
Annoying or not, inaccurate or not and 1997 or not, this is a method that collects some of the data the original poster wants to catch.
code_burgar
2009-09-08 12:22:49
Isn't that more 1984?
drhirsch
2009-09-08 12:30:21
@codeburger: Problem is, that data has no value and collecting it makes no sense. It's like going to the highway and counting all the green cars in one hour in order to collect data to base a next-week-traffic forecast on.
Tomalak
2009-09-08 12:31:48
Actually, counting green cars can be a decent statistic, if it's used to guess the total number of cars. It can actually have some sort of use. This, however, can't.
Matchu
2009-09-08 13:31:29
Actually, counting green cars is a bad idea. Business traffic and non-business traffic is quite distinct, including in the times it's most prevalent and the colors of the cars.
MSalters
2009-09-08 13:34:13
@Tomalak: While I wholeheartedly agree with you, the question whether the data has any real statistical value or not, is ultimately totally irrelevant to the original question. To go with your green car analogy and put it into perspective: No, counting green cars cannot be used to forecast next week traffic frequency. However, if you are a) restricted to only being able to count the green cars, and b) you need an answer to the question of whether or not there are cars using the highway at all, green car data is all you need.
code_burgar
2009-09-08 13:55:04
Since the OP was looking to know how many people bookmarked the site and not how many people tried to use some unreliable JavaScript that would work only in a minority of browsers to do so, "green car data" is not all that is needed.
David Dorward
2009-09-09 08:51:05
If you reread the OP's question you will notice a mention of surveys as the last resort, thus it is obvious that the OP is putting value on any data obtainable. As for the "unreliable JavaScript .. would only work in a minority of browsers" comment, it is obvious that you are basing your comments on your own misinformation and not on actual facts. http://www.dummwiam.com/resources/jFav1.0/jFavExamples.html is an example of "unreliable JavaScript" that simply works in multiple versions of three browsers that take up 90% of the market share.
code_burgar
2009-09-09 09:33:54
A:
You can put a link which add your website in user's bookmark, and notify you that someone added your site to his bookmark.
You can also monitor numbers of people that come directly to your website, that usually means they have you in their bookmarks, or better, that they know your site's name so well that they just type it.
Edit : Using google analytics, you can have a good overview of the proprotion and number of people comming "directly" on your website.
No other way i think, except polls
Clement Herreman
2009-09-08 12:09:28
+1
A:
In addition to the browser bookmarks, don't forget about tools like Google bookmarks and delicious. Those will be important to your stats.
Rap
2009-09-08 12:09:32
+1
A:
As David said there's no way to tell how many people bookmark it in their browser.
But I do all my bookmarking with Delicious.com, so you could look at getting some sorts of stats from the various third party bookmarking sites.
edeverett
2009-09-08 12:11:10
+1
A:
It's not 100% accurate but you can try putting a cookie when they first arrive to your site. If a request is made with that cookie and no referrer information in the Request object, than you can assume that the user has added your site into bookmarks (a very optimistic assumption but the worst case is that the user is loyal enough to visit your page directly typing the url which is as good as adding to the bookmarks I believe...)
Eren
2009-09-09 08:47:49
A:
I disagree with Tomalak's response.
This data would be useful for bloggers doing sponsored writing (and for companies) as another way to gauge the popularity of the site. Why do you think the number of Diggs shown on a page or post works well?
Secondly, I work for a company that sends emails advertising very expensive products. Often people read the email, go to the site, and bookmark the relevant page to come back to in a few days or a week, and then buy. Bookmark information would be useful as to whether people found pages interesting (and used in conjunction with bounceback rates, click throughs and unsubscribes etc.) Then we could further estimate which people bought products based on email advertising, but at a later date that may niot necessarily be associated with the email being read/opened.
Jenni
2009-10-15 08:41:54
A:
This is not useful information. Bookmarking is meaningless in isolation. I currently have hundreds of bookmarks, most of them for articles that I tagged as "looks interesting, but I don't have time/energy to read and understand it right now, so I should come back later"... and then never got around to going back to. On the other hand, I have about a dozen bookmarks that I visit daily. Even if you knew I had your site bookmarked, you wouldn't know which group you're in (but it's overwhelmingly likely that you'd be in the "never used" bookmark pile).
The only way to determine which category you're in is to count actual visits to your site. This also has the added advantage of telling you about people who subscribe to RSS feeds, which are at least as "sticky" as bookmarks, regardless of whether or not they bookmark in addition to subscribing.
It sounds like the actual information you want may be how many "loyal" visitors you have - people who keep coming back. Counting bookmarks won't tell you that. Counting visits, along with some simple cookie and/or IP address based code to identify repeat visitors, will. If you don't want to write the code to manage that visit tracking yourself (and there probably isn't any reason why you should), you can get it free and easy from Google Analytics.
Dave Sherohman
2009-10-15 09:21:06
A:
It only "makes no sense" if you're a moron. Clearly being able to distinguish between someone who stumbles on your site and someone who thinks enough of it to want to re-visit has value. Building a following is the point of many web sites. Certainly a news site or site that provides information is going to be defined by daily readers and not google hits.
Barney
2010-02-20 13:12:57