1. 1 NHS Choices Hay Fever – July 2013

2. 2 Contents – by data sources Webtrends  Visits to hay fever related pages  Percentage of NHS Choices traffic which is hay fever related  Daily visits trend vs. media coverage  Popular hay fever content on Choices Splunk  Location searches for hay fever hotspots  Searches vs. population Hitwise  Websites receiving traffic from related searches

3. 3 Introduction Hay fever, also known as seasonal allergic rhinitis, affects one in five people in the UK. The symptoms usually include sneezing, itchy and watery eyes, and stuffy nose. In Britain hay fever is mainly caused by grass pollen. Around 95 per cent of hay fever sufferers are allergic to grass pollen. Tree pollen can cause hay fever too. Around a quarter of hay fever sufferers are allergic to tree pollen. Mould spores and weed pollen can also trigger symptoms. This year it was predicted that pollen levels would be the highest they have been in 50 years meaning a large proportion of the population would be affected by hay fever in 2013

4. 4 Webtrends Visits to hay fever content have been significantly higher during 2013 than they have in the previous two years, peaking in June with over 377,000 visits. Visits to Choices overall increased by 85% in June 2013 compared to the previous year whereas visits to hay fever related content increased by 139% over the same period. In previous two years the drop off in visits from June to July has been around the 41% mark but in July 2013 the monthly decrease was only 12%.

5. 5 Webtrends The proportion of overall Choices visits made up by hay fever related content followed a similar pattern to 2012 during the tree pollen season but saw significant increases during the grass pollen season, in June this year 1.31% of traffic was hay fever related compared to 1.01% the previous year. In 2011 the initial spike occurred in April but the cold, long winter and spring meant that the hay fever season was a month late in 2013, with hardly any pollen until the end of April. This delay meant that several pollens would peak at the same time.

6. 6 External Influences The impact of hay fever related news stories published in the national media can be seen, with spikes in visits corresponding to the time when stories were released. A number of the articles also had links to the MetOffice ‘pollen forecast’ page, which features a link to the NHS Choices ‘hay fever condition’ page. The biggest spikes occurred over the mid-June to mid-July period, when pollen levels were exceptionally high. July also saw a heat wave, which kept pollen levels high.

7. 7 Webtrends The hay fever symptoms, introduction and treatment pages were the most visited in the topic with over 700,000 combined visits year to date. Of all the visits to hay fever related content on Choices, 77.6% were to the Health A-Z section, 22.2% to Live Well, 0.2% to News and 0.1% to the videos library.

8. 8 Splunk The media highlighted 10 cities and towns across the UK as hay fever hotspots in 2013, these locations represented between 26.2% and 31.9% of all the searches during the 4 month period analysed.

9. 9 Splunk Searches as a % of population It is not surprising that the bigger cities across the UK such as London, Manchester and Birmingham accounted for around 20% of the total searches based on the population size. The above illustrates how some of the lesser populated hotspots such as Cambridge and Reading had a higher proportion of visits relative to their respective population.

10. 10 Hitwise NHS Choices received just under 40% of all search terms clicks from hay fever related searches over the 4 weeks ending 27 July 2013 (based on a search term portfolio of over 3,000 words/phrases). This is more than the other 9 sites in the top 10 combined. We reached as high as 48% of search term clicks in mid June. Popular search terms included, ‘hay fever’, ‘hay fever symptoms’, ‘hay fever remedies’ and ‘hay fever cure’. The were some search terms in the portfolio for which NHS Choices received no traffic, including ‘hay fever sore throat’ and ‘sore eyes hay fever’ but the percentage of search term clicks these represented in the overall portfolio was less than 1%.