Healthcare.gov: Growing Traffic Pushing Limits

December 1 was the deadline prescribed by the President, to get the Healthcare.gov website back to health, and not get dizzy as soon as users start flocking to the e-commerce site. 

With fixes in, now some are blaming the site to be too fast!

According to new performance level the website needs to be able to handle 50,000 concurrent users at a time, and up till 800,000 users every day.

The website traffic...is growing

 

There are no official stats available on the website traffic to healthcare.gov. 

However, some tools in the public domain have estimated growth of traffic in the last few months. Before we pore over their charts, a word of caution. The data from these services have been estimates, usually on the lower side that the actual traffic, and their accuracy may vary widely. So proceed with caution...

With that caveat out of the way, let us look at what some of these tools are telling us.

Compete is used by most of the digital marketing gurus. Their estimates show:

 

the website experienced a hockey style type growth, moving from 2.36M visitors in September 2013 to 10.8M by end of October.  This translates to 360,000 visitors every day. 

The next is Quantcast another popular site. Their estimates have been on a more conservative side

Healthcare.gov attracted almost 2M (1.195M) visitors in August, rising to 2.79M in September but could reach only 6.3M in October. They estimate that the growth has been slower and rise has been gentler. 

Note that the two estimates differ widely for October. November data is yet to be in.

Alexa has a different story to tell.

Alexa, however, only assigns ranking to websites based on a combination of visits and page views. Alexa has assigned a rank of 549 to healthcare.gov (lower the number higher the traffic). For comparison Google, Facebook, Youtube, Yahoo and Amazon hold the ranks 1-5. aarp.org holds rank 500 in the US. 

For a quick context Google (Alexa Rank 1 fielded 178M visitors in October 2013).

Emerging website visitors profile

Alexa has some other interesting stats. They estimate that the website has only 21% bounce rate in October. Either the user are determined not to give up or the website has been responding well.

Users have been spending on an average over 6.14 minutes on the site- another sign of stickiness; an average page view of almost 7 pages per visit (lots of browsing going on).

The brief demographic profile shows relatively many more women than men have been visiting healthcare.gov.  Maybe women are more concerned about affordable healthcare plans or maybe they have more patience with e-commerce.

This may have implications for Democrats. Women have been traditionally favoring the Democratic Party.  If they get disenchanted because of frustration in getting the right health insurance plan through the website, they may express their disapproval at the ballot. Note that Obama has 12% lead among female voters against his Republican rival in 2012.

We see that relatively more users who have some college have been visiting healthcare.gov website.

 The stress test is coming

The website is going to face more stress in the months to come. It was handling traffic at half way mark of 800K daily visitors, by the end of October 2013. Keep in mind too that the real test will be when 50,000 users would be able to find their plan and complete the application concurrently.