It can be said that the “elections” may be one of many “festive” activities which has received overwhelming popularity similar to most of the annual Thai festivals. This may be due to the eagerness of each citizen coming out to exercise their rights. Even some individuals working in a foreign country where there is no availability of polling stations nearby to conduct advance voting, would have to plan to take time off in order to return to their domicile to cast their votes. All of these factors have a direct effect on businesses, and one of the businesses that iPrice expects to be hit considerably is “ecommerce”. This is due to the fact that people would be focused on searching for their polling stations, their favorite party, or even the type of transportation that most people would choose to book online in advance. These factors would all make “online purchases” decrease significantly. By how much, iPrice has taken the 10 days period prior to the election and compared it with the same period in February (15-24 Feb and 15-24 Mar), by utilizing Google Analytics to gather the data, and the results are as follows.

Comparison of website visitors between 15-24 Feb and 15-24 Mar

Even though the impact is not as significant as during the Songkran festival or the New Year, but it clearly shows the differences of the consumers. It was evident that the election frenzy started from the first week of March. The graph shows the results of visits to product websites that began to decrease notably, and continued to decline during the second week in which some areas began to open for advance voting. The decline continued until it reached the lowest point on March 24, the actual election day. Moreover, on March 23 (one day before the election), the southern part of Thailand has announced that provinces adjacent to the Andaman Sea should watch out for tsunami waves, as an earthquake had occurred at around 18.00 hrs., which is another crucial factor in which netizens would turn their attention to other events instead of buying products online.

Which political party garnered the most searches on Google?

iPrice also used Google Trends to search for the most popular political parties that people searched for in the 10 days before the election, by using the top 5 political party names as keywords. The political parties that received the highest searches from as reported by Google Trends, include the Phuea Thai Party, the Future Forward Party, the Palang Pracharath Party, the Bhumjaithai Party, and the Democrat Party respectively (ranked by the summation of Search Interest during 15-24 March, or 10 days before the elections).

In which provinces are each leading political party fan club based?

If the political party name search data from Google Trends were to be classified by region, it would also show the trend that each political party has for each provinces, as follows;

This is in accordance with the expectation that the 2019 elections will have a direct effect on Thai ecommerce business, but does not reduce the amount of online traffic as much as the Songkran Festival and the New Year. This may be due to people having to leave their houses to exercise their rights, but not to return to their original domicile to reunite with their family or relatives, which requires the same period as the Songkran festival and the New Year. According to the data collected after the election, it was found that the number of online visitors increased steadily, and is expected to return to the same level in less than a week after the election frenzy subsides.

Written and analyzed by Kanitta Sasakun iPrice

For more information: https://iprice.vn/