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?
Answers:
Thank you for visiting the Q&A section on Magenaut. Please note that all the answers may not help you solve the issue immediately. So please treat them as advisements. If you found the post helpful (or not), leave a comment & I’ll get back to you as soon as possible.
Method 1
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.
Method 2
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.
Method 3
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.
Method 4
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…)
Method 5
I think the answers given are over complicated. Just use Addthis.com. It gives you an analytical report that shows you have many people bookmarked the link.
Method 6
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
Method 7
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.
All methods was sourced from stackoverflow.com or stackexchange.com, is licensed under cc by-sa 2.5, cc by-sa 3.0 and cc by-sa 4.0