I’ve been tracking the number of pageviews of RxTrace for the last two years and I can report to you that I have recently observed a fairly abrupt rise of those numbers that I describe as a “surge” when compared with the previous trend. The surge I am seeing started in November (discounting December when the holidays interfere with readership stats) and continues to this day. I have seen a comparable surge of the number of new subscription requests for RxTrace.
What is the cause of this development? I have a theory which I will share with you. With this essay I am also announcing that I have formalized an RxTrace advertising program to enable companies to advertise their events, products and services unobtrusively in the margins. More about that in a minute, but first, here is a graph of the relative number of pageviews each month for the last two years.
You can see what I mean. Notice that the baseline floats around but doesn’t change much over the two year span. And then in November it tips upward and then after the holidays it blows out into the surge. March has started out strong and seems poised to end up in the same ballpark as February and perhaps even higher. That’s quite a rise in readership.
Here are the top ways people find RxTrace essays. All of these sources have played a role in this surge.
- Named Subscribers
A lot of people subscribe to RxTrace through email. (BTW, that email list is spam-free and is not for sale. See the RxTrace Privacy Policy.) I call these “named subscribers” even though all I have are email addresses and not names. As I said, the growth in this list is accelerating now faster than at any previous time. The largest source of the RxTrace pageviews each week come from these subscribers and other people that these subscribers pass a link to via email. - Google Searches
Another large source of pageviews each week comes from people who discover RxTrace through keyword searches on Google (and other search engines but you’d be surprised just how dominate Google is as a source right now). If you do a few searches of the typical keywords that someone might type into Google regarding these topics you will find that RxTrace essays are well represented in the result sets. There are now 85 essays posted on RxTrace. With each new post the number of potential Google hits gets larger. - LinkedIn Discussions
Each time I have posted an essay on RxTrace in the last few months I have listed it on a number of LinkedIn Groups as a “Discussion”. That brings in a good number of new readers each week. - Facebook
I don’t have a clue why RxTrace gets so many pageviews from people coming to it through Facebook, but some weeks I see a bunch and other weeks I see almost none. I do not have a personal Facebook page and my experiments with starting an RxTrace Facebook page seems to have failed miserably. I don’t think anyone comes in through the RxTrace Facebook page that I started a few months ago and it doesn’t have any followers. It is so much work to keep it up-to-date that I plan to eliminate it shortly. - Blogrolls at DrugChannels.net and BlueSphereHealth.com
Most weeks I see a good stream of traffic originating from DrugChannels.net, Dr. Adam Fein’s blog, and a few from BlueSphereHealth.com, author Mark Davison’s blog. I am honored that they have chosen to list RxTrace on their blogrolls and very much appreciate the traffic. Both are on my blogroll and I hope that they receive as much traffic from RxTrace as I receive from them. - SecuringPharma.com
I am very grateful that the fine folks at SecuringPharma.com decided to place links to specific RxTrace essays on their homepage under the “Around The Web” banner. For most of 2011 there have been links to at least one RxTrace essay in that section almost all the time and at the peak last fall, 4 of the 8 links listed there were to RxTrace essays! This amounts to a fairly steady stream of pageviews. - Twitter
I have been tweeting references to my RxTrace essays since March 2010 under the name “RxTrace”. Although small, the number of my Twitter “followers” has steadily risen over that time and so the number of pageviews coming from people entering through my tweets and the retweets of others has also grown.
Pageviews originating from all of these sources have increased significantly (surged!) since November. The overall baseline has more than doubled over the span of just a few months. That is significant. I think it is a reflection of a surge in the number of companies who have recently allocated money in their budgets for serialization, ePedigree and track & trace systems and these people are searching for information about what to spend that money on and who to spend it with. And those people find RxTrace.
ADVERTISE ON RxTRACE
As I said, I have decided to start offering ad space in the margins of RxTrace. Ads displayed on RxTrace will be viewed by people who are seeking information that will help them decide how to spend their serialization, ePedigree and track & trace budgets. Companies offering products and services to these companies will not find a higher concentration of potential customers who are armed with budgets than the readers of RxTrace. Companies who host events that target companies who are looking for information about serialization, ePedigree and track & trace can benefit in the same way by advertising on RxTrace.
If you have any questions, or if you’d like more information, including rates, click on the “Advertise on RxTrace” menu button at the top of this page, or click here.
Dirk.
Dirk: As one of your recent new subscribers I feel very fortunate to have found RxTrace after many frustrating attempts to find a consolidated site concerning all things pedigree. I was finding all kinds of random articles and opinions on the web, but your site puts everything in focus, in well written articles that are valuable and meaningful to those of us getting ready to enter the pedigree battleground again. My company like many others is starting to see 1/1/2015 as not that far away given that my operational leaders believe they must have an solution in production no later than April of 2014, runing production pilots and integrating with other supply chain partners. Work backwards from that date and we need a fully designed “system”, manual processes and IT automation, by early in 2013 to enable development and testing of that design to be completed by early 2014. So to me, RxTrace is THE source for current and accurate information concerning pedigree, serialization, regulatory updates and the technial side. Thanks for taking the time to build and maintain such a quality site.
Bill
Bill,
Thanks for your supportive comment. I’m glad you found RxTrace and that you find it valuable. From here on, developments in this area are going to start happening more frequently. I may not be able to cover everything in RxTrace, but I hope to cover as many topics as I possibly can. Stay tuned.
Dirk.
Not sure where they get the idea track & trace will add billions in costs…
“As lawmakers, we urge you to consider approaches that are feasible and workable for the supply chain, and to recognize the importance of not requiring untested costly mandates such as a prescription drug ‘track and trace’ system for supply chain stakeholders,” NACDS stated in the written testimony. “Such requirements would add billions in additional costs to the healthcare system and take time and resources away from pharmacies’ ability to provide pharmacy services to their patients.”
http://www.pmpnews.com/news/nacds-underscores-pharmacys-commitment-patient-safety-support-pdufa-reforms-testimony-submitted