web design

Regis & Kelly Website Stats

July 28, 2010 |Let's Tweet

If your anything like me, I'm not much of a fan of hearing how a website doubled in traffic over a few days. After all, 2 pizzas is twice the amount as 1 pizza. 2000 is double the amount of 1000. And 1,000,000 is twice the amount of 500,000.

Now that we've finished the math lesson, lets get back to the point. Tourism PEI issued a press release stating the traffic to their website doubled and they had to increase capacity to their site.

I didn't like this press release and asked the communications officer for Tourism PEI what the actual numbers were. Julie ended up sending me to the director who had access to the stats.

He did some comparables in Google Analytics, comparing July 12-18, 2009 to July 11-17,2010. For those unaware, Regis & Kelly filmed 4 shows here on July 12th and 13th. PEI ended up being the 2nd most Google'd item for a while on the 12th and was within the top 5 trending topics on Twitter. In the morning of both days, they shot live and in the afternoon they shot for the other days.

According to CTV, the show was a hit for them. They had 968,000 viewers for this morning talk show with additional coverage on other shows such as Canada AM, e-talk, extra, live at 5 and the list goes on.

Item	2009	2010	Change
Visits	54,779	130,098	+137%
Pageviews	418,906	765,940	+82%
Pages/Visit	7.65	5.89	-23%
Time on Site	6mins, 54 secs	5mins, 23 secs	-22%

The most popular page, besides the index page, happens to be the Places to Stay page, with the second being the search results for the search page. The third top visited page was the Things to Do page.

One of the more interesting comparisions between the two years is the browser wars. I've done a quick comparision of the top browsers.

Browser	2009	2010	Gain/Loss
Internet Explorer	75.58%	68.48%	-7.1%
Firefox	16.88%	16.47%	-0.41%
Safari	5.55%	9.80%	+4.35%
Google Chrome	1.48%	3.96%	+2.48%

So what else could the province have done to make this campaign go better? One thing, is they really should have had a specific landing page setup for the Regis & Kelly show.

Remember how our Tourism ads used to say, call 1x800 and ask for Carolyn? The reason tourism did this was to track how many people asked for Carolyn, then they would have an idea if the marketing campaign which stated, "ask for Carolyn" was successful. The province should have setup a special landing page just for the Regis & Kelly event which would track how things went. An example of this would be using a domain like visitpei.com just in the Regis & Kelly ads. This way, the province would know exactly how well things went. It would also help the province make it more targeted to the audience, since they would know anyone going to visitpei.com would have been from the Regis & Kelly show.

The problem with tourism, is that its not easy to say we were up or down because of this or that. If tourism is up next year, can we say that the Regis & Kelly publicity was a huge success? No, you can't. Why? Because there are so many factors involved, one being obviously the economy.

Obviously this year and last won't be record breaking years due to the economy being in the slumps however with the economy recovering more this year, that alone will have a impact on tourism.

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