As King Charles III’s Coronation was an event of worldwide interest, attracting TV crews from over 125 countries, a UK TV audience of 18m and many millions more around the globe, RealityMine wanted to use our Data Marketplace, which offers data from 12 countries and 150,000 panellists, to test three hypotheses:
- Despite the tradition of the event, the Coronation would be a truly digital experience for many people
- Google searches would be the outlet for people’s curiosity given that this was the first Coronation in over a generation
- That Penny Mordaunt stole the show!
The Coronation would be a truly digital experience
Clearly, broadcast television still performs very well for ‘tentpole’ events which people want to consume live. These events also lend themselves to social media as people share their experience and feelings with friends and family. This was evident in the data: the most used social media app during Saturday 6th May was Facebook, which saw almost 7% increase in users during the day compared to the previous Saturday, and an increase of 17.4% during the time of the Coronation events (from 9am UTC to 1pm UTC).
In contrast, Instagram had a decline in usage (-6.3% all day, -12.8% during the Coronation), probably because of the nature of the app, which does not lend itself to live coverage of news and events. Users likely moved to other platforms.
Google Search provides an outlet for people’s curiosity
On Coronation Day, ‘coronation’ featured in more searchers than any other word, phrase or person, closely followed by ‘Penny Mordaunt’ with the first royal to appear on the list being ‘Prince Harry’ in 16th spot.
Interestingly, Mother’s Day was on May 14th in the US and other countries and so ‘mothers day gifts’ featured highly as people made plans for the following weekend.
From here, we expanded the search terms related to the coronation, in order to get a better view of what people were searching online.
The terms we included for the purpose of this case study were:
| Ranking | Search Term | Count |
| 1 | coronation | 580 |
| 2 | penny mordaunt | 567 |
| 3 | 451 | |
| 4 | google translate | 423 |
| 5 | mothers day gifts | 399 |
| … | ||
| 16 | prince harry | 341 |
Coronation, king, Charles, queen, Camilla, prince, princess, Harry, Meghan, Markle, Penny Mordaunt, William, crown, sword, Mordaunt
As expected, there were more searches related to the Coronation (5,720 registered searches) on the day of the event, when compared to the previous Saturday (534 registered searches).
During the morning, searches for ‘coronation’ and other related terms increased dramatically as the event happened.
Penny Mordaunt stole the show
As the second most searched term was Penny Mordaunt, with just over 10% of all coronation-related online searches, we wanted to investigate a bit further, by combining the data from RealityMine Data Marketplace with data from our RealLife products.
From here, we were able to establish that the most used app category on the day of the coronation was, as expected, search apps.
When compared to the previous Saturday, search apps saw an increase of almost 32% on app usage. There were also statistically significant rises for social media from this audience, mirroring the wider behaviour, as well as media (news & magazines) which is also logical given they were likely to visit a news site as a result of their search activity.
What were people doing on these search apps?
Well, the majority of the people searching for Penny Mordaunt spent less than a minute on these search apps, and while this doesn’t show a change in behaviour, compared to the Saturday before, it does show a sharp increase on quick searches, possibly scanning the first page of search results without going into any specific website at the time.
The RealityMine Data Marketplace enables customers to access real behaviour data from real people via a global, privacy-compliant dataset, built with best-in-class permission-based RealityMine technology.
Individual-level app and web clickstream behaviour with demographics is available for license, with the RealityMine Data Marketplace providing a complete view of today’s mobile connected consumer spanning search, website and webpage visits, app usage, and ad and media exposure.
If you would like more information about RealityMine Data Marketplace, please get in touch (sales@realitymine.com) and we will consult with you on your consumer objectives and requirements.
