This week we went live with two new areas in our
Greystone.Net Benchmarking database: traffic from referring sites, and mobile traffic. Both areas were added based on feedback from participants. After I had a chance to review the preliminary data, two interesting findings jumped out:
1) Mobile traffic to hospital Web sites continues to increase. Roughly a year and a half ago, we asked our research panelists what percentage of their web traffic came from mobile devices. The mean answer was 1.5%. The median response in our database for September 2010 is 2.9%. If the adoption of mobile traffic continues to follow
Moore’s law and doubles roughly every 18 months, within a couple of short years healthcare marketers will start seeing a majority of visitors accessing their Web sites via mobile device. I have seen a
number of prognosticators predict that this will happen as early as 2015, and so far the numbers are supporting this argument. Greystone has been on the
mobile bandwagon for a long time now, and this finding absolutely confirms the importance of having a strategy to reach the mobile audience.
2) Facebook has become an important contributor of referring traffic to hospital Web sites. We have long heard anecdotal evidence from our customers that social media is good for driving traffic to the Web site. The web traffic numbers for Facebook are still not overwhelming: according to our Benchmarking data, less than 1% of Web referrals come from the site. However, relatively speaking, Facebook has become a powerhouse. The social media titan is frequently showing up near the top of the list of referring sites, consistently ahead of other major healthcare sites and portals. The next most popular social media platforms, Wikipedia, YouTube, and Twitter lag far behind Facebook in terms of their performance driving traffic to hospital and health system Web sites. Curiously, there were several participants who do not have Facebook pages that are nevertheless getting referring visits from this site. If you are trying to convince your administration that your organization needs a Facebook page, show them the amount of Facebook traffic coming to your Web site already. Failing to reach out and engage this audience represents a significant missed opportunity.
We will continue to monitor these two key trends moving forward, and hopefully identify some new patterns as well. If you are interested in a free trial of Greystone.Net Benchmarking, please
contact us to learn more.