January has been a successful month at French Connections, with site visits, new visitors and enquiries for holiday rentals and properties for sale all up on the same period last year. In an uncertain economic climate, we reckon this deserves a shared pat on the back with our staff, advertisers and holidaymakers.

During January, enquiries for both holiday properties and properties for sale increased by 28% on last year. The most popular region was Provence; popular themes were city breaks, events and festivals and theme parks and our top guides were the regions of France and autoroutes.

Overall visits to the website increased by 13% and pages were viewed a healthy 1,400,414 times – that’s equivalent to over 45,000 page views each day.

The main source of visits was search engines, which means that our search results increased by nearly a third. This is convincing proof of success for our dedicated ongoing campaign to improve both performance on search engines and the credibility and quality of the website, which are now increasingly important factors.

We always want new people to discover the delights of France and book holidays, so it’s great to know that over 65% of January’s visitors were new to the site, which is slightly up on the same period last year. Let’s hope this augurs well for the rest of 2012!