LL Owners - Bookmarking Percentages?

[MadMax]

Just wondering if anyone else pays attention to what percentage of surfers bookmark your link list, and if so what you consider to be a good percentage. I'm currently running at about 3%, and I'm just wondering how that sizes up with some of the other LL owners around here.

[Greenguy]

Last time I looked, it was over 30% of my traffic.

[iwillbenumber1]

Originally posted by MadMax
Just wondering if anyone else pays attention to what percentage of surfers bookmark your link list, and if so what you consider to be a good percentage. I'm currently running at about 3%, and I'm just wondering how that sizes up with some of the other LL owners around here.

what exactly do you mean by bookmarkers? Does you set a cookie for a visitor who visits in the last 24 hours? Or is that visitors who have no referrer, i.e. type in's.

With my TGP i have gotten up to 50% bookmarkers at times. But, that is people who the script writes a cookie, and they visited in the last 24 hours. LL owners probably have spuratic visits maybe once or twice a week. Maybe a couple times a month. It seems that the true figure might be hard to track.

Jason

[MadMax]

My stats program tracks bookmarkers by hits to the favicon.ico file, so it's basically tracking surfers who add the bookmark to their favorites.

[iwillbenumber1]

I think it is hard to define exactly what a bookmarker is......

For example I visited GG link-o-rama many times back in the nineties and maybe every so many months over the last few years.

Just because you visited a site in 2001 and put in your bookmarks list, and saw it again 3 years later and visited doesn't make you a bookmarker.

I would say a bookmarker is someone who visites on a regular basis with less than 1 week between visits.

Maybe some clever script writers can come up with a better way of tracking stuff like this.

Jason

[Surfn]

My stats show me how many bookmarkers I have everyday and it varies from site to site. On the low end it's close to 17% on the high end is just over 50%.

It's pretty easy to understand everything about your traffic if you learn how. For me that's the difference between making a few bucks and earning a nice living

[selena]

Originally posted by Surfn
It's pretty easy to understand everything about your traffic if you learn how. For me that's the difference between making a few bucks and earning a nice living

An excellent viewpoint, imho, and one that has obviously done well for you.

I will never understand people who ignore their stats. There is alot about them that puzzles me, and I have alot to learn. But I try, because I don't know how you have a comprehensive plan of action without understanding your stats.

[Alphawolf]

All good stats proggies will show you repeat visitors.

I'm not sure how to feel about "bookmarkers" as it implies they simply mooch off the free content all the time.

I dont' see why someone would need to continue to hit the LL if they join a site or two.

[Opti]

Originally posted by MadMax
My stats program tracks bookmarkers by hits to the favicon.ico file, so it's basically tracking surfers who add the bookmark to their favorites.

are you certain it doesn't count firefox users as bookmarks? Firefox and some other new browsers load the favicon in the address bar for every visitor.

I don't really know how to be certain who is a bookmark and who isnt from my server log stats. And I am not certain there is any stats package that works from log files that can do it accurately. If they dont use the favicon method, I think they can only be counting the number of visitors without referers, which must include anon browsers and bot traffic, unless they keep updating some ginormous file cataloging all the bots and spiders out there or something... anyway I have my doubts about anything Ive seen so far actually giving an accurate bookmarker count.

When I compared the numbers a traffictrade script using cookies reported as bookmarks with what I had previously thought from my stats package on one domain.. I was pretty dissapointed .. and still am not sure what the accurate figure is as the nocookie user count was quite high too.

I figure that if any stats package really can do it accurately, then there must be a way for me to work it out manually too.... So if anyone reading can tell me a grep command I can run on my log files to accurately report bookmarkers I would love to know.. or even the logic of what I need to match in the logs so I can work it out myself would be great.

(maybe I should post this question in the tech forum)

[Greenguy]

Originally posted by iwillbenumber1
I would say a bookmarker is someone who visites on a regular basis with less than 1 week between visits.

I always thought a "bookmarker" was someone that visited your site by using the link they have stored in the "favorites" or "bookmarks" or whatever the browser calls them.

The favicon, like Opti sais, is loaded each time the "bookmark" menu is accessed, so that's not a good count as far as traffic.

[Surfn]

I consider bookmarkers those who use direct access (typein or bookmark) as opposed to a surfer who is referred from some site.

[Greenguy]

Originally posted by Surfn
I consider bookmarkers those who use direct access (typein or bookmark) as opposed to a surfer who is referred from some site.

"direct access" - that's a nice term for this thread

[Surfn]

AW stats last 24 hours on one site:

Direct address / Bookmarks (pages)90391 16.4 % (hits)1230642 11.8 %

[Linkster]

I track people who actually click on my bookmark button and it runs about avg 1% - I do have it separated out from those that load the favicon and return visits etc, so that I can see the effect of different placement of the bookmark link/button - its been really useful at adding people that actually do come back within a few days

As far as bookmarkers being moochers - I can tell you that bookmarkers are probably the best source of income for a LL - they have put a "trust" in that WM, and that trust translates to when they are ready to buy, they will probably buy from you instead of someone they havent bookmarked. If you were to compare two LLs with the same "amount" of traffic, but one with 50% return traffic and one with all new traffic, I would bet that the one with bookmarkers is outselling the other by at least 500%

[MadMax]

So it seems the original question was poorly conceived |rasta|

I'm at about 24% on the direct address/bookmarks section of AW Stats, so in the end I guess the best answer for me is that so far I'm doing about average, which is good in itself for a new site. It seems it's entirely possible that I've been paying attention to the wrong stats...not the first time and probably not the last|bat| , but hey...you've got to try and learn something new every day anyway.

I like those who add my sites to favorites and use the links, as I feel they're more likely to give me some word of mouth advertising than joe average the surfer, and my experience with advertising both on and offline has taught me that word of mouth is about the most effective form of promotion as it passes a sense of trust to each new user/customer.

[Greenguy]

Originally posted by Surfn
AW stats last 24 hours on one site:

Direct address / Bookmarks (pages)90391 16.4 % (hits)1230642 11.8 %

I just looked at my stats again & I was damn close - 33.4 %

[Linkster]

I had 50.9 % for Direct address / Bookmarks if thats what you were asking

[Surfn]

Originally posted by Greenguy
I just looked at my stats again & I was damn close - 33.4 %

HRU is at 48%

[RawAlex]

findpics is showing 28%... down a little form before, the .com was about 32%

Alex

[Fonz]

Smiling Pussy Links is at 19.7% with the "Direct address / Bookmarks" thing. Not too bad I think since it isn't around for that long

For the "Add to favorites (estimated)" thing I'm at 3.3% (seems to be this number every month)

[DangerDave]

Well IMO.. there is NO way of assess ing this truly..

As said, counting favico accesses doesn't work..

..and direct access mesaures are also terribly innacurate as it only counts visitors without referers. With the number of "security" programs etc blocking referers these days.. that number would be false too.

DD

[MadMax]

For those who may be interested, this is how AW Stats calculates that "Estimated Add to Favorites" (Info from AW Stats Documentation at Sourceforge)

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 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 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.

[Opti]

At the risk of displaying my ignorance on something I should know more about...

Webalizer shows direct requests this month at 15% on **************.com which is close to what I "felt" was the real level of bookmarker traffic before reading this thread.... but that sounds very low now!

Trouble with that webalizer figure is that it hasnt always made sense... and this month shows 38% on sleekssickestporn.com, which was a new site in February... and works out to be 6000 unique bookmarkers returning daily.. something I just didn't believe was possible. (anyone think it is?)

I think I'm just going to switch to AW stats so I can at least compare apples to apples with a few people.. like Marker has been telling me to do for ages ;-)

[kit]

There is one problem wioth favicon.ico : Some browsers re-request is from time to time just for updating icon info, also some old browsers request it each time you visit site.
So, come back from 3% hill to realistic 1% or even 0.5%. I agree with Linkster in my estimates.