Shire Kids Festival Promotion on the Library Website

Whenever the library attempts something a little different or tries a new type of promotion or event I think it is important to review what we did and try to determine what impact it had.  When it involves the website I always find it interesting to try and evaluate firstly, whether the promotion had any effect on the usage of the website, and secondly, whether the promoting something on the website contributed positively to the activity.

In the last school holiday program there was a Council wide effort to promote school holiday activities across all units under the banner of the Shire Kids Festival. It would be great to see an analysis of this promotion, and whether it resulted in increased attendance at holiday programs across the Shire.

On a smaller scale I wanted to look at the analytics on our website to see what impact the Shire Kids Festival might have had.  It was promoted on the home page of the website as shown in the screen shot above. We track the number of clicks on this promotional spot and have done so for some time. We have always promote the our program on the website in the lead up to the school holiday activities, so we have historical data to compare.

Shire Kids Festival compared with the previous month

The first data I looked at was to compare the number of clicks on the Shire Kids Festival with the number of clicks on the the various other promotions we had on the home page during the previous month.

The Shire Kids Festival promo was on the home page for 26 days from 15 June - 11 July. During the 26 days immediately prior to that we had a number of other things promoted in the same spot on the home page including: Author Talks, the Annual Book Sale, Cronullla Sharks Storytime and the Community Survey. Figure 1 shows the number of clicks for the two periods.

Figure 1: clicks on the homepage promo

Shire Kids Festival compared with previous school holiday activities

So initially it looks promising. There are significantly more clicks on the Shire Kids Festival promo than on the other promos in the period immediately prior, 394 vs 283.  But as I mentioned we always promote the holiday activities on the homepage and we know that demand for holiday activities is high. How did these holidays compare with previous school holidays?

I compared the Shire Kids Festival with the April school holidays this year, as well as with the same holiday period from 2015.  Figure 2 shows the number of clicks on the school holiday activities promo on the homepage of the library website across the 3 different periods.

Figure 2: Clicks on homepage promo for different school holiday periods

The number of days that the school holiday activities were promoted on the homepage is close enough to warrant comparison. What is interesting is that the July holiday activities were so similar across the 2 years, however, the April holidays were significantly less.

General website traffic compared across the 3 periods

Based on these numbers it's possible that the Shire Kids Festival didn't have such an impact after all. One could argue that our holiday activities promotion would have achieved very similar traffic without the Shire Kids Festival branding. Of course, we can't ever know for sure. But why did was the April holiday traffic so much lower?

Figure 3 shows that total visits to the website across the 3 periods corresponding to the school holiday promos above.

Figure 3: Total website traffic during school holiday promo periods

While the trend is consistent, the results are subtly different in this graph.  We can see that total website traffic is much higher during the lead up to the July holidays across both years and drops significantly through period leading up to the April holidays.

When looked at closely, we can see that the 2015 promo period was 2 days longer that the Shire Kids Festival promo period and as a result there was higher traffic to the site (27k in 2015 vs 26.5k in 2016). The number of clicks on the holiday activities promo was very close over both periods but during 2016 there were 3 more clicks (394 vs 391) recorded over 2 less days.  It's possible that the Shire Kids Festival promotion did have a slightly positive impact on this number, but in the end it averages out to only 1 more click per day in 2016 as opposed to 2015.  It is debatable whether this is a significant increase and whether is can be attributed solely to the Shire Kids Festival branding.

Given the drop in traffic during March/April 2016 I would expect to see a corresponding drop in clicks on the homepage promotions as there are less people seeing the site. This would explain why there are fewer clicks on the April holidays. Why the traffic is so much lower during this period is another question though.

This year Easter occurred prior to the April school holidays and the website promo would have been on the website right through the Easter period. We know that a lot of people go on holidays during the Easter long weekend and perhaps that had an effect on traffic to the website. It may also be that if people are away in the school holidays they are not going to attend our school holiday program.

This is, of course, purely speculation as typically this period (around March - May) is a comparatively busy time in the library. What do you think? If you have any thoughts about this drop in traffic your welcome to share your thoughts in the comments.