May 08, 2006

Cancer Research UK Online Growth

Cancer Research UK was another one of the Hitwise award winners based on UK visits in 2005. The site took the award for the Health & Medical - Research category, where it ranked #1 for most of 2005 (a position it has maintained so far in 2006). The site also ranks in our Community - Organisations category where it held a strong rank of between 6th and 4th in 2005.

Cancer Research UK is not an organisation (or website) to rest on its laurels - the powerful "I Shouldn't Be Here" campaign and the Race for Life have been heavily promoted again this year and have propelled the site's market share of visits ever-higher. Comparing market share of UK visits in April 2005 and April 2006, Cancer Research UK has seen a 62% increase in visits.

While search is hot on everyone's lips and talked about as the most lucrative source of visits to most sites, we have seen a decrease in the share of visits that Cancer Research UK receives from search. I looked at downstream visits from each of the major search engines, and the share of visits they send to Cancer Research UK had decreased year on year for each. Couple this with a decrease year on year in the share of UK internet searches for "cancer research" and "cancer research uk" the top two terms sending visits to the site and one has to ask if it ain't search - what is it?

Email Marketing

Cancer Research UK appears to have run some extremely successful email marketing campaigns in the past few months. The following chart shows the share of upstream visits to Cancer Research UK from Email Services.

During the week ending 29th April, 38.03% of the site's upstream visits came from Email Services. This compares to 14.07% from Search Engines and 6.5% from the Race for Life website. Email marketing presents significant challenges for online marketers, however Cancer Research UK offers a good example of a site that seems to have successfully engaged its donor base through email communications.

Posted by Heather Hopkins at 12:53 PM

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