Traffic to Hospital Web Sites

by Ed Bennett on May 23, 2012

in Uncategorized

Traffic to U.S. Hospital Web Sites (according to Hitwise)

Monthly Visits – U.S. Traffic Only

  • TC

    Can you explain how you define “Visits Share”? Thank you.

    • Anonymous

      The Visits Share number is the percentage of traffic a site  received out of all traffic to sites in the category. Hitwise  tracks 2500 web sites in the “Health and Medical – Hospitals” category, and this chart shows the top 20. 

      Last week, the Cancer Centers of America had almost 4% of all hospital traffic, The Cleveland Clinic had 3%, and so on.

  • Tom Hughes

    Ed, I don’t understand why, if these hospital websites are the 20 most visited, several of them have a number larger than 20 in the “Rank 05/12″ column. Can you explain, please?

    • Anonymous

      Tom, 

      This chart shows the current top 20 hospitals out of list of over 2,200.  The top ten stay fairly consistent, but lower rankings will fluctuate quite a bit.

      For example, look at Rex Healthcare, the last hospital on the chart.  This week 5/19, it ranked #20 out of 2,200  but on 5/12 it was #85. The week before it was #175, and four weeks ago it #134.

      • Tom Hughes

         Thanks, Ed! Now I understand it.

  • Barry Wallace

    How does Hitwise collect the data for hospital site traffic? Is it self-gathered, or is there a process where the hospitals submit their data individually?
    Also, are all the entrants single hospital sites, or are multi-hospital system sites included in the list?

    • Anonymous

      Hitwise uses sampling tools and ISP logs to gather this data. Nothing is collected directly from hospitals or other organizations. (They track all web sites – hospitals are a tiny fraction)

      Details here - 
      http://www.experian.com/hitwise/hitwise-methodology.html 

      I’ve compared their estimated traffic to my actual numbers using Google Analytics, and it’s close enough for general comparisons. The entrants are based on unique web addresses, so the sites on the hospital list will be a mix of individual and multi-hospital sites.