Case Study

King Charles III Coronation Case Study

By May 31, 2023 No Comments

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: 

  1. Despite the tradition of the event, the Coronation would be a truly digital experience for many people  
  2. Google searches would be the outlet for people’s curiosity given that this was the first Coronation in over a generation 
  3. 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). 

Line chart showing amount of online searches related to the Coronation on 6th May 2023 versus online searches related to Penny Mordaunt. The teal line, Coronation searches, shows a spike during the morning, as the event was happening, peaking at around the time King Charles III was crowned, while the orange line (Penny Mordaunt searches) remains lower and flatter, but shows an increase at around the same times as teal line spikes.

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. 

Line chart showing the usage of Instagram app on Coronation Day versus the previous Saturday. Both lines show a similar pattern of usage without huge differences.

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  google  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). 

Line chart showing amount of online searches related to the Coronation on 6th May 2023 versus previous Saturday. The teal line, day of the Coronation, shows a spike during the morning, as the event was happening, peaking at around the time King Charles III was crowned, while the orange line (previous Saturday) remains lower and flatter.

During the morning, searches for ‘coronation’ and other related terms increased dramatically as the event happened. 

Line chart showing amount of online searches related to the Coronation on 6th May 2023 versus previous Saturday. The teal line, day of the Coronation, shows a spike during the morning, as the event was happening, peaking at around the time King Charles III was crowned, while the orange line (Penny Mordaunt searches) remains lower, but shows an increase at the same time as teal line does.

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. 

Bar chart showing the categories of apps used by those who searched Penny Mordaunt online during the Coronation of King Charles III. Teal bars show previous Saturday data, and orange bars show data from 6th May 2023.

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. 

Horizontal bar chart showing the duration of usage for a search app. Less than one minute shows a long orange bar pass the 6000 mark, compared with previous Saturday which shows a teal bar around 4500. From 1 to 15+ minutes, the duration of usage barely reaches 1000, decreasing as the time increases, showing people mostly spent a short period of time on the search app.

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.