.......and similarly, what's happened to French Connections?

[Lachouette]

When we took over our B & B last year, the previous owners had already paid the year's subscription to French Connections, and I'm pleased to say that it generated loads of enquiries which became bookings.

This year, now that we've paid the subscription ourselves - only one booking and no other enquiries.  I'm about to contact FC and see what they have to say for themselves, but would be interested to hear if others have had the same experience.

Jan

[Coco]

Well if people are complaining that VF AND FC aren't creating enquiries perhaps it's just a quiet year, or a late starter, although personally (touch wood) I have already had 14 nights more bookings than last year and more than twice as many bookings for the summer as I had at the same time last year.

I too have been hesitating about renewing my VF ad for similar reasons but have now decided to give them one last chance and I am going to have an ad without a link to my website.  At the moment I can only be certain that two of my bookings for this year have come via them, all others have emailed me via my own website.  Now does that mean that they have found MY website on the web, found it via one of the several free or cheap sites that I'm on, or via VF?  Likewise if you have a link to your own website from FC you may be getting people looking at your site via them and then contacting you via your own site.  And of course, whenever I ask people how they found us they can never be any more specific than "on the internet" but considering that I ONLY advertise on the internet that's hardly surprising!

[Lachouette]

[quote]Well if people are complaining that VF AND FC aren't creating enquiries perhaps it's just a quiet year, or a late starter, although personally (touch wood) I have already had 14 nights more bookings t...[/quote]

"and more than twice as many bookings for the summer as I had at the same time last year"

We too already have more than twice the number of bookings for July and August than we 'inherited' when we took over last May, but these have been mostly the French, ringing us, I assume by finding us in the G de F guide.

As you say Coco, they could be emailing direct from our website, but there have been precious few of those!

Don't seem to have cracked how to post the bit I wanted to quote .

Jan

[Ian Hoare<br>All the best<br>Ian<br>La Souvigne Corrèze<br>http:www.souvigne.com]

Hi

I'm answering slightly sideways, because I'm not in either of these guides.

However I've found that advance bookings are down on last year, and that they were down on the year before at this time of the year. However, I think cold weather, and Easter may have put people off booking early, because in the last few days I'n running at about 3-4 a day.

As for knowing where people come from. It is possible to do two things. You can make two identical looking extra entry pages to your site, one called url\FC and the other url\VF. If you then count visits to these entry pages, as well as your "main" entry page url\index.htm you'll then know exactly how many "click throughs" you get. In fact there are little scripts you can integrate into one single entry page, if you wish, which can log where people come from.

Alternatively, you can just ask email enquirers. "Did you find us from a search engine, or via an online guide like FC or VF?." Either will work perfectly well.

[Ianhaycox]

You should be able to get all the referral information from the company hosting your website without the need for extra pages.

If your hosting provider gives access to the web server log files then you can run them though a 'free' report generator to show if the vistor came direct, via google, altavista, etc. of via a click through on VF of VC. Whatever.

They may supply reports for you as part of your hosting package. Lots of 'useful' info about entry pages, exit pages, length of visit, visitors geographic location, search keywords... However the one REALLY useful bit of information you can't get is the people that searched and never found you.

[Quillan]

I was starting to wonder if perhaps my bookings, which appear to be coming from my own website were in fact from eithe VF or FC. Well if you use a good hosting service you can go in to the control panel and look to see were your visitors come from. We last month I had something like 6 bookings from 151 referals to my site out of 1933 visits in total (I can brag and tell you I had 40679 hits but then hits are not true visits). Out of these one was from FC which is actually one for than from VF.

The conclusion? Well I'm not getting the visits and I am not getting the bookings from either of these two. Fortunatly, and I don't know why, people like my website and are at least finding it and I am getting bookings from it which without it I would be stuffed. So there is a problem with these sites.

Does anyone get a message about certificates when they enter the VF site because if they do then so do punters and that would put them off.

My stats at the begining are from my host but even then if you look at my site the stats there generated by MS Frontpage are different which makes me somewhat sceptical of these companies who say "well yes but we get xxxxx hits per hour (I get 562 now work that out)", it's a load of old twaddle, not only are they kidding the advertiser but themselfs as well.

And to those budding website people who brows the forum who say computers don't lie then all I can say is I have a bloody good website for hits then.

[mascamps.com]

Is it possibly that people are using booking systems more these days than pure listing services like VF & FC? ie do people more frequently want to click on a "book now" rather than await an e-mail or whatever coming back?

 

Arnold