View Full Version : shopwindow maximum daily allowance
Hi, does anyone know how many calls a page makes if it has ten items on it? It is one call or ten? Or does it depend on how many different affiliates are shown on the page. My usage is quite high and I was woundering if I was getting that many calls of if the numbers are for each item shown.
Cheers, ejmo.
Hi, also what time does the daily count start/finish?
Cheers, ejmo.
Confuscius
09-06-07, 11:23
I do not know the formula for the number of calls made per page other than it is more than one!
The call count is reset at 5.00pm every day.
Paul
Hi ejmo,
The usage stats figure in your AW account is realtime so to find out the number of calls for a particular page just go into your AW account, load your site page in another browser, then refresh your usage page and you'll see the figure drop.
It's a little tricky to answer your specific question accurately but it is possible to return 10 items with 1 call, and this is the normal approach for straight product listings and hotpicks. However, any particular page will also be loading the category tree and looking up category and merchant info which requires further calls. The number of calls will vary from page to page.
Hi, thanks for the replies. I have worked out the 5pm reset time. I knew one call per page was too good to be true, I was sure I was not getting that many visitors.
Would a search engine visit count in the same way and would this also increase a normal AW banner link?
Cheers, ejmo.
A search engine visit would use the same number of calls as a human visit because the page still has to retrieve all the category and product data.
Banner images only register an impression when requested from the server and I believe that most search engine robots don't 'load' images when indexing pages so therefore don't add to banner impressions. That's only my assumption though and I stand to be corrected.
Do aw impressions count each time a banner is shown or only once for each visitor? Would a person looking at ten pages all with the same banner count as ten impressions or just one?
I have used a banner in the footer that I do not use on any other pages to monitor the number of times my pages are shown. This is showing at 7 today and yet the number of request in aw shopwindow is over 25000. I assume that the search engines are making most of these calls.
Cheers, ejmo.
10 banner loads = 10 impressions whether it's the same person or 10 different people. Chances are most of those SW calls are for search engine robots.
If you're currently monitoring traffic with image load stats from your server logs you might want to check out http://www.statcounter.com as a free, reliable alternative.
Something I've noticed is that if you use a Google site map creation tool all the calls are used up very quickly and the site becomes inactive until the next day. With an alleged 3 million plus products on the site then, just creating on site map would seem to use at least that number of calls and probably more. Does this mean we cannot create Google site maps or have I missed something here?
Confuscius
26-07-07, 13:25
One of the issues with major sites is that you soon learn that YOU have to exercise control over what you produce. It is not as simple as there are 3 million products but there are many thousands of ways of finding them through the menu structures.
It is unrealistic to create a full site map for such a site as by the time you had created it then its contents would have changed as both products and merchants come and go.
Some site map producers let you start at a particular point and delve so many levels deep - these are the best to use, IMO.
It is possible to use restrictions in creating site map files and then reflect those restrictions in your robots.txt file so that you only let Google index a part of your site (you can achieve some neat effects) - this is also a way to create niche sites in Google's memory but serve up a full site to visitors - lots of things you can play around with these sorts of issues. Unfortunately, not all spiders have such capabilities to index pages based on filename limiters (e.g. MSN).
Paul
Whilst I accept what your saying, it occurs to me that someone could easily (maliciously) close down a site for a day by simply running such software. The ones I have tried simply ask for a base URL and then crawl the site. Maybe I'm being a bit paranoid.
Confuscius
27-07-07, 12:52
It does not require anyone being particularly malicious to cause issues! There are some well known spiders that do not know when to stop (e.g Voila!) and you have to proactively manage your sites via your robots.txt as spidering activity increases.
As regards creating sitemaps, my personal favourite tool is this one (and I have not joined their affiliate scheme!):
http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/standalone-google-sitemap-generator.html
It is well worth the purchase price but you can try out the Free version to get the hang of it.
I hope this helps.
Paul