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[swirt]

Thanks everyone for your input. I was asking these questions (unique visitors vs repeat visitors, etc) because we do have a site tracker with our website and we are able to track our visitors and see who is a repeat and who is new.
It seems to me that the repeat folks maybe more interested in booking a room if they keep coming back to your site. But then again I don't really know.
We had 328 visits to our site in July (with 62 being repeat visits) and 262 visits so far this month. with 15 repeats). With being on the web for four months I don't think that is too bad, but how do you measure that? I tried to ask a local gal today what her visits are each month because she has been doing this for several years and her response was "oh I don't know, I don't keep track of that stuff."
I know it depends on your town where you live etc so that is why I tried to ask someone who is in the biz..

There's really not a good answer to the question of how many visitors to a site are good? For example, what you site gets in a month, mine gets in a day....is it meaningful? Not really because I have 100 pages that are not directly about my B&B but are directly about my area... so somebody may find me for a search for "white deer" but of the 100s that come for that page, maybe only 1 will even be looking for a place to stay. This also doesn't account for the number of rooms being offered. 300 unique visitors a day is more than enough for my 3 guest rooms but if I had 7 rooms it may not be enough.
The real question you have to ask is, are you as full as you want to be? If you are not, then you have to look at where there is room for improvement. It is hard to look at just one metric (the same way taking your temperature is an incomplete way to read your own health). You have to look at many metrics in order to arrive at an overall picture of website health. Here is the B&B tracker article I put together that Catlady already mentioned. It is kind of long but it does aim at giving you a way of looking at multiple metrics to get a better feeling for the health of your site.

 

[swirt]

I forgot to add that most of our visits are from the Katy Trail web site. We are a half block from the trail so we are listed on their site. Google is our next big one, then our city web site and chamber website.
we are able to see exactly what folks typed in that led them to us. this is very helpful. But it doesn't answer my question about repeat visits vs new or unique visits. I guess I might have just answered my own question.... .if most of my hits are coming from good sites ie the Katy Trail and google etc... then new/unique visits are better right?.

Repeat visits are a good indication that people like what they see. It means you are "in the running" as people may be deciding between a few places. I know typically in our house my DW will scope out a few places she found interesting and then she'll give me her top pics for me to take a look. Since we are using the same ip address, we'll be seen as the same person on a repeat visit.
You are also right that you need a steady supply of new visitors. Repeat visitors are nice, but reservations are nicer