7

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?

Adam Bellaire
  • 108,003
  • 19
  • 148
  • 163
Bigballs
  • 3,729
  • 10
  • 30
  • 27
  • 11
    The obvious question is: *Why* do you want to know? Figures like this have no practical value whatsoever. All they possibly can do is push your ego. The question is based on a handful of wrong assumptions: 1) Not everyone bookmarks pages they find useful. 2) Not everyone uses the same technical means to bookmark a page. It is impossible to cover them all. 3) Setting a bookmark has no significance beyond the amount of significance you are willing to interpret into it. – Tomalak Sep 08 '09 at 12:25
  • I totally agreement with Tomalak. Not everyone bookmarks sites they find useful. And, any statistic you gather will be meaningless because all it really tells you is how many people clicked your link to add the bookmark; it doesn't tell you how many people bookmarked it nor does it tell you how many people actually use the bookmark once they create it. If you really need to know, you might find a survey question on your home page (how did you get here) provides more accurate results. – Jeff Siver Sep 08 '09 at 13:31
  • 1
    Great question! I am trying to find the same thing. I am finding people bookmark the orientation page, but they should really bookmark their homepage otherwise they are always served the orientation video. I am trying to gage how many users are doing this. – Climbs_lika_Spyder Jun 30 '16 at 19:16

7 Answers7

13

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.

Quentin
  • 914,110
  • 126
  • 1,211
  • 1,335
11

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
  • 12,025
  • 4
  • 35
  • 53
  • 37
    Don't do that ... it's annoying as hell. – Pop Catalin Sep 08 '09 at 12:09
  • 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 Sep 08 '09 at 12:10
  • 7
    that is so 1997... – Natrium Sep 08 '09 at 12:12
  • 5
    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 Sep 08 '09 at 12:22
  • 6
    Isn't that more 1984? – Gunther Piez Sep 08 '09 at 12:30
  • 12
    @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 Sep 08 '09 at 12:31
  • 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 Sep 08 '09 at 13:31
  • 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 Sep 08 '09 at 13:34
  • 1
    @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 Sep 08 '09 at 13:55
  • 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. – Quentin Sep 09 '09 at 08:51
  • 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 Sep 09 '09 at 09:33
2

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
  • 8,012
  • 33
  • 28
2

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
  • 284
  • 2
  • 10
1

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.

0

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
  • 10,274
  • 4
  • 35
  • 57
0

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
  • 45,363
  • 14
  • 64
  • 102