I've been trying to get an accurate count of the unique visitors to my Web site. To date, I've been using the Unique Visitors in the Daily Visitors Section of the Visitors section in SmarterStats. However, I've begun looking at the referring sites section and I've noticed that the Unique Visitors count is largely made up of visits where the host is my E-commerce Web site, marineandreef.com. I understand the No Referrer (bookmark or direct-entry) count and all the other entries, but I don't understand why my site is listed as a referrer.
Further review shows that these visits where marineandreef.com, my Web site, is listed as a referrer have been increasing significantly as a percentage of the vists (more than the No Referrers and Google visits). Looking at the Referring Links report I've also notices a very significant amount of traffic from France and Japan on certain days with some of the visits having very high number of page views (and we do not ship out of the country--so they visitors would not be buying from us). Any idea of what is going on? Mostly, I want to have an accurate count of unique visitors every day.