Living Without HepC

Here are some statistics about the The HepC Forum for 2006. Google Analytics is a programme I use to keep track of various statistics about the usage of the Forum. I have been looking at this year’s stats and found some interesting information. [Google Analytics, through the use of cookies, tracks Unique Visitors to the Forum and how many pages are read on each visit. This is more sophisticated than just tracking the number of “hits” the site receives. On the simple “hit” basis, the Forum gets more than 150,000 hits per month - a considerable amount of traffic.]

During 2006, there were 121,259 Visitors to the Forum and 1,830,389 Pageviews.

This means:
There were an average of 10,000 visits per month
On average, 15.09 pages were viewed during each visit

Of the 121,259 Visitors to the Forum, 94,724 were Return Visitors and 25,432 were New Visitors

Predominantly Visitors are from the UK and then the United States. This is a list of the other countries where the most Visitors came from (followed by the [number of visitors] and percentage of total):

United Kingdom [70,911] 58.48 %
United States [30,435] 25.01%
Australia [4,940] 4.07%
Canada [4,768] 4.07%
Yugoslavia [1,369] 1.13%
Belgium [1,185] 0.98%
Spain [1,060] 0.87%
Switzerland [887] 0.73%
Netherlands [496] 0.41%
Germany [484] 0.40%

But Visitors also come form other countries around the world. Here is a list in descending order: Czech Republic, Japan, France, Israel, New Zealand, Ireland, India, Norway, Latvia, Turkey, Pakistan, Finland, Luxembourg, China, Poland, Greece, Croatia, Egypt, Romania, Italy, Bulgaria, Singapore, Russian Federation, Denmark, Mexico, South Africa, Thailand, Malaysia, Saudi Arabia, Cayman Islands, Sweden, Philippines, Morocco, United Arab Emirates, Indonesia, Argentina, Hong Kong, Brazil, Estonia, Austria, Portugal, Hungary, Nigeria, Taiwan, Islamic Republic of Iran, Vietnam, Republic of Korea, Republic of Moldova, Georgia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Malta, Kuwait. (I know from deleting spammers that some originate from these countries and they are not all Visitors interested in HepC.)

How do they find the Hepatitis C Forum? What other sites have led Visitors to the Forum?

Source [Referring Site] and number of Visits:
(direct)(none) 40,715
Google 33,908
hepc.nhs.uk 6,605
theboltons.plus.com 5,804
hepcboy.com 4,205
yahoo 8,449
search[organic] 1,608
hepcuk.info (HepC Trust) 1,463
britishlivertrust.org.uk 1,407
msn 1,098
aol 911
blogger.com 401

And how often do they visit? About a fifth (25,656) visit just the once. But slightly more than a fifth (26,552) visited more than 201 times over the year. And the rest fall somewhere in between. Referring to someone who visits at least 15-25 times in the year as a ‘regular reader’, the statistics below shows there are over 42,000 regular Visitors to the Forum.

1 Visit - 25656 Visitors
2 Visits - 5168 Visitors
3 Visits - 3063 Visitors
4 Visits - 2293 Visitors
5 Visits - 1947 Visitors
6 Visits - 1688 Visitors
7 Visits - 1524 Visitors
8 Visits - 1390 Visitors
9 to 14 Visits - 6507 Visitors
15 to 25 Visits - 7900 Visitors
26 to 50 Visits - 11220 Visitors
51 to 100 Visits - 12756 Visitors
101 to 200 Visits - 13595 Visitors
over 201 Visits - 26552 Visitors

This confirms my long-held view that as well as the core of people who sign up as Members and post regularly there are many more Visitors who read and ‘lurk’ without becoming Members. We have recently more and more new members introducing themselves in the “Hello, I’m New” section by saying they have been reading regularly for some months and have decided to now post for the first time.

To me this is important for us as Forum members to realise. We are not just having a dialogue between ourselves as Members, we are also speaking to the silent majority out there who haven’t yet found their voice in this HepC discussion.

I know how difficult it was to come to terms with the reality of having HepC and I suspect lots of people find it hard to actually commit themselves to writing about themselves and this virus on a website – they need to take time to read and absorb.

As we move into the New Year I would like to remember the ‘lurkers’ and the ’silent majority’ readers and wish everyone a healthy and successful 2007.

This entry was posted on Sunday, December 31st, 2006 at 5:39 pm and is filed under Journal. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.