DEC site leaps to top position in Hitwise's humanitarian category
Howard Lake | 17 August 2004 | News
The Disasters Emergency Committee’s (DEC) Web site has rapidly increased its market share of humanitarian/charity Web sites, according to online competitive intelligence company Hitwise United Kingdom.
Hitwise’s research shows that DEC’s Sudan appeal has successfully attracted many people to its Web site, which carries both news on the humanitarian emergency in the Darfur region and the facility to donate online.
Hitwise reports that during July and August 2004 there has been “a surge of traffic” towards the Web sites of charities and humanitarian organisations involved in Sudan.
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Over the past few weeks the DEC’s Web site has been “one of the fastest-moving” of the sites that Hitwise monitors. From the week ending July 17, the site jumped 178 places; by July 24 it had reached the number one position in the Humanitarian category.
The site’s market share achieved a similarly dramatic increase, jumping from less than 0.02% to more than 12% in the space of one week.
Hitwise say that their daily data demonstrates the rapid impact of the DEC’s publicity and fundraising campaigns, which started on 20 July with fundraising appeals by celebrities. At its peak traffic to the DEC’s Web site reached almost 30% market share within the Humanitarian category.
Hitwise’s data demonstrates the valuable role of PR and press in securing visitors to charities’ Web sites. The homepage of BBC News (news.bbc.co.uk) provided the most downstream traffic to the DEC Web site: delivering more than 10% of visits to the DEC Web site, BBC News even outperformed search engine Google, which generated 9%. The BBC Radio 4 pages also provided a substantial proportion of referrals, with 4.4% of traffic coming from www.bbc.co.uk/radio4. Clearly, getting covered by major news organisations and in particular securing a link to your Web site in the “related links” element of these news items’ pages is very valuable.
Hitwise have also shared the latest stats on the most popular search terms for Web sites in the humanitarian category.
| Search Term | Share (%) | |
|---|---|---|
| 1. | sport relief | 9.05% |
| 2. | oxfam | 6.39% |
| 3. | christian aid | 5.33% |
| 4. | amnesty international | 5.24% |
| 5. | diabetes | 5.09% |
| 6. | nspcc | 4.80% |
| 7. | vso | 4.65% |
| 8. | sports relief | 3.95% |
| 9. | cancer research | 3.51% |
| 10. | samaritans | 3.22% |
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About Howard Lake
Howard Lake is consultant editor of UK Fundraising. He founded the site in 1994 and successfully sold it in 2022. As director of Giving X Ltd he is exploring growing giving on a massive scale.
He is the founder of Fundraising Camp and co-founder of GoodJobs.