Context can help you better compare your campaign or coverage performance against others. This pronouncement sounds like a tongue twister, but stick with us!
Looking at your own performance without exploring benchmarks and averages makes it harder to answer ‘is that good or not?’
Earlier in the year, we launched the CoverageBook Benchmarks Report 2025, which explores the nearly six million items uploaded to CoverageBook during 2024 to provide you with context around:
- Average Domain Authority
- Average social shares
- Typical estimated coverage views
We did this at both a macro level and took a deeper dive at outlet level, focusing on a list of key US / UK media outlets. You can access this information here (macro level analysis) and here (publication deep dive).
Our customer base is broad, international and operates across many industries. We work directly with brands and also with agencies, from multinational organisations to start-ups. It means that you supplied us with links to hundreds of thousands of different types of media outlets during 2024. We thought it would be interesting to share what we see at an industry level.
So, we selected a sample of top performing media outlets per industry which either generated a lot of attention for our customers (volume), which prompt significant audience engagement (social shares), or which are influential in an industry (such as STAT or the BMJ for health).
In this post, we’ll focus on a cross section of health related titles – both consumer facing and trade outlets, to give you an idea of what good looks like for this sector.
The media outlets in focus for this analysis were:
Consumer:
| Men’s Journal | Health | Psychology Today | Health Central |
| Women’s Health | Sustain Health | Hone Health | US News Health pages |
| Men’s Health | AARP | Buoy Health | Australian Men’s Health |
| Everyday Health | Verywellhealth | Healthcare Homes | India Economic Times health pages |
| Healthline | Health News | Hip and Healthy | Australian Women’s Health |
Trade:
| Fierce Healthcare | Fierce Biotech | Mobile Health News | Healthcare Newsdesk |
| STAT | Digital Health | Health IT Answers | Health Tech Digital |
| Home Healthcare News | Rama On Healthcare | Healthcare Business Today | Health Estate Journal |
| Pharma Phorum | KFF Health News | Healthcare Info Security | Science |
| Healthcare IT Today | Modern Healthcare | Healthcare and Protection | British Medical Journal |
Representing outlets from a range of geographies including Europe, North America and Asia Pacific, and contributing over 6.5k URLs combined across our customer base.
Initial observations showed us that:
- Average DA for consumer outlets was higher for consumer titles
- Average views and engagements were higher for consumer outlets
The trade titles in our sample had DA scores ranging from 32 (Health Estate Journal) to 92 (BMJ) – resulting in an average DA score of 63.
Some of the trade titles rank as well or better on Domain Authority than some consumer titles. For example, the British Medical Journal has a DA of 92, not dissimilar to US News (92) and the Economic Times of India (94), whose health coverage features in this sample.
Other trade outlets in the health sector with a high DA include Science (DA:88), the peer-reviewed academic journal of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and STAT (DA:86) which is an important trade title for the pharmaceutical and life sciences sector.
Among our consumer focused titles chosen, there was also variation in DA score – from Psychology Today (DA:93) to Sustain Health (DA:33). There were notable volumes of health coverage supplied from general news outlets such as US News, The Economic Times of India and AARP (which focuses on issues affecting the over 50s age group), which we represented in our sample, and which nudged up the average DA score for our consumer titles slightly.
There was also broad variation at outlet level in terms of potential article reach:
US health and wellness site Healthline outperforms others in terms of average article level reach, it is considered a competitor site to WebMD. In a similar observation to what we saw in fashion outlets, this title may be using the practice of ‘evergreen URLs’, updating web pages first published years ago with fresh content – and this is having an impact on potential article reach.
Some health trade outlets including Science and the British Medical Journal (which carry both academic papers and articles) perform better on average article views than some of the B2C titles in our sample. This was also true for some of the pharmaceutical trade outlets such as STAT and outlets in the ‘Fierce’ family such as Fierce Biotech and Fierce Healthcare.
- 43% of consumer focused health articles in our sample received no social shares
- 59% of trade focused health articles in our sample received no social shares
- We didn’t see any examples of content from this industry ‘going viral’ (ie being shared >10k times on social)
Here’s how your average social shares compare with our benchmark data for B2C outlets:
And what the typical volume of social shares are in our sample of B2B health outlets:
- Consumer titles are using ‘evergreen’ URLs which likely perform well in terms of organic search; they refresh content on these pages over time and adjust the ‘published date’ accordingly to trick the algorithm
We also identified the practice of ‘evergreen URLs’ when exploring average social shares for B2C health outlets – where a URL created years ago continues to be updated with fresh content, such as this piece from Very Well Health about chocolate allergies, which was originally posted in 2008. Health indications and disease symptoms rank well for organic search traffic, so the publisher has ‘tricked the algorithm’ and updated the date stamp and content within.
If your consumer focused health coverage receives more than 138 social shares, this means it is prompting better than average audience engagement, in trade titles this occurs if your coverage receives >17 social shares.
You can find more information here in part two of our 2025 CoverageBook Benchmarks report, which includes information for other industry verticals.
So what have we learned as we explored 2024 coverage benchmarks in the health sector?
- Expectedly, consumer titles on average reach more people than trade titles, and are more likely to generate higher levels of social engagement.
- If your Estimated coverage views from consumer fashion outlets are higher than 40k, your coverage is performing better than average on reach.
- Some trade outlets can reach bigger audiences than consumer coverage, so should always be considered and included in a media outreach campaign.
- If your Estimated Coverage Views from trade health outlets are higher than 1.7k, your coverage is performing better than average on reach.
- Some trade outlets also perform as well as consumer titles in terms of Domain Authority.
- Outlets refresh content and ‘published dates’ on high performing URLs – we call these ‘evergreen URLs’. These URLs will be outliers in terms of average social shares and views when exporting to CSV from your CoverageBook account so should be easy to spot. You will also see that the ‘article created’ date will be quite old when you export this information to CSV. Given they perform well for popular organic search terms, these articles may be worth targeting specifically.
