Picture of Émilie LacharitéÉmilie Lacharité is Digital Content Editor at CMAJ

If you think the majority of web traffic on cmaj.ca comes from Canada, think again. In the past year, our website got a total of 2,162,025 visitor sessions (or hits) from all over the world, but only 37% of the traffic came from Canada. In other words, 63% or almost 2/3 of the traffic was from outside this country.

Our American friends generated 28% of total visits, with New York, Los Angeles and Chicago being the top US cities to visit our website. We can see, in the graphic below, that the UK, Australia and India round off our top five. We also get a fly-by of the top 20 countries, by visitor session.

Illustration of CMAJ.ca visitor sessions analytics map

Our website analytics also allow us to look at which articles have attracted the most attention. Over the past year, five articles have caused noticeable spikes in website traffic. They are, in order:

Gambling and hospital lotteries: looking out for losers

Current and former marijuana use: preliminary findings of a longitudinal study of effects on IQ in young adults

Relation between place of residence and postpartum depression

Association between serum cholesterol and eating behaviours during early childhood: a cross-sectional study

Comparative effectiveness of angiotensin-receptor blockers for preventing macrovascular disease in patients with diabetes: a population-based cohort study

Of note, the above marijuana article dates back to 2002, but because someone recently posted it on the user-generated news and entertainment website Reddit, our website received double the traffic that day, mostly from the US. Thank you, social media.

Another article that consistently receives a lot of traffic is a review on the health benefits of physical activity. It is by far the most viewed article on our website in recent years.

Analytics provide fascinating insight into website traffic patterns, which then allows us to realign and readjust to our readership. So…hello world.