How do browsers find the hotel's web site

To answer the question you can

• add a counter to your front page
• analyse your raw log files using special software

To satisfy my curiosity I did an analysis of a hotel web site that had (apparently) accumulated around 5500 unique visitors over a period. I then looked at the results from a counter (Excite) and from 3 software packages (Web Trends, Fast Stats and Sawmill). These stats were

• total recorded numbers of visitors varied from 5251 on Sawmill, through 5578 on WebTrends to 5878 on Fast Stats (the front page counter only records visits to the front page, not the whole site)
• numbers visiting the front page varied from 2183 on Excite,2364 on Sawmill,2516 on WebTrends and 2550 on Fast Stats
• the percentage of visitors that were given as either "no referrer" or from the site itself varied from 41% on Excite through to the range 65% to 75% on the 3 web analysis software
• of referring sites that could be distinguished country-house-hotels.com was the largest referrer (measured across a range 457 to 526), followed by devon-calling.com (137 to 146)
• only two other referring site got into double figures, @UK (38 to 45) and cornishlight (36 to 51)
• nothing else was worth mentioning. For example the AA site only brought in 5 referrals
• search engines showed great discrepancies between the 4 different methods. It would appear that Alta Vista sends many visitors not to the front page but to inside pages, as do Yahoo and Hotbot. Excite appears to mainly send to the front page
• You can draw the conclusion that "figures vary" depending on how you measure them - having said that measurement is useful, particularly over a time period where you can watch trends, in other words the chenge on a week by week basis.

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