Romain Lhote, head of data marketing at L’Équipe explains during the 11th edition of the Digital Analytics Forum how the company successfully introduced dynamic web content and improved conversion rates through going from using data as a dashboarding tool, to a genuine activation culture.

1. PA R I S
1 4 n o v e m b r e 2 0 1 9

2. HOW ANALYTICS DATA FUELS
EFFICIENT PERSONALISATION
Romain Lhote
Head of data marketing @ L’Equipe

3. More than 32M French people READ OR WATCH
L'Équipe EVERY MONTH
Since 1998
Since 1946
Since 2000

4. READER ENGAGEMENT
STRONG RELATION BETWEEN THE BRAND AND OUR READERS
2.8M
users per day
1.5 billion
page views per month
6mins
per visit
80%
from mobile
700
page views per
subscribers per month
Sources: AT Internet, Médiamétrie.

5. DATA TEAM

6. ON THE ROAD TO 2020
OUR TEAM HAS GROWN RAPIDLY over THE LAST TWO YEARS
Traffic manager Head of data
Data team in 2015 Data team in 2019
Data Analyst
Data Analyst
Data Analyst Data Analyst
SEO ManagerData Scientist Data Scientist

7. Dashboard Segmentation PersonalisationScoring
1 2 3 4
What we have done so far
FIRST STEP: DASHBOARD
FROM DASHBOARD TO PERSONALISATION

8. FROM ‘OLD SCHOOL’ TO AUTOMATED DASHBOARDS
› QLIK
› AT INTERNET
› iOS
› Android
› CRM
› METADATA
› Copy / past from Analyser › Excel via API
2015 2017 2019

9. SECOND STEP: SEGMENTATION
NO DUDE, DATA IS NOT JUST ABOUT DASHBOARDs
Email
Push
Google Ads
Facebook Ads
Display on the website

10. FOOTBALL HAS ALWAYS BEEN THE MOST IMPORTANT SPORT
[...] When we have a multi-sport homepage that can be
customised with the sports we want, we will have achieved
our goal.
Disappointing, too many articles about football.
Too much football
Why do you always focus on football?
Football, football, football, football.
Source: Store Android
BUT SOME PEOPLE THINK IT'S TOO MUCH, AND GUESS WHAT… IT’S TRUE
WE UNDERSTAND DATA IS IMPORTANT, BUT WHAT
CAN WE DO?

11. LET’S USE DATA TO SOLVE THIS PROBLEM OF PERCEPTION…
What people think…
20%
Reality
48%
Source: Internal

12. PERSONALISATION IS THE
ANSWER!

13. Skill
improvement
Mastering the
technology and data
WITH A PARTNER DATA TEAM
THIRD STEP: SCORING
WITH A PARTNER OR BY OURSELVES ?
A FEW WEEKS 18 MONTHS
Transparency

14. Web analytics Data Article metadata
Article
A journalist writes an article
They choose 4 tags
All this data is stored on GCP
Article is live on L’ÉQUIPE
Page view on the app
AT Internet datacentre
Data stored on GCP
Dataflow API call
WE STARTED WITH BOTH WEB ANALYTICS AND METADATA

15. PERSONALISATION

16. HERE IS PATRICK. WHAT DOES PATRICK LIKE ON L’ÉQUIPE ?
+
1 2 3
+
Articles he
read last
year
We compare with
what other users
read
We add many
weightings for the
calculation to be
relevant

17. WE USE THE TF-IDF METHOD
17
Count nbr of tags for all users
DFT = *Document Frequency Tag
Count nbr of tags per user
TF = *Tag Frequency
TF-IDF = (TF x +1)
log (1+n)
(1+DFT)

18. WELL WELL WELL
86%
Football
ranked #1
We did an
amazing job
But it didn’t
work well

19. WE APPLIED MANY WEIGHTING PROCEDURES
19
Football
It was not true
Season
News only
Only web analytics
Weighting procedures
Square root of nbr
articles created
1 year
Live, push, home
Questionnaire

20. WHAT DOES THIS SCORE LOOK LIKE ?
100
65
63
60
14
cyclisme
esport
tennis
football
formule_1
2801
1024
875
205
179
football
cyclisme
tennis
rugby
esport
Nbr of articles I
read
The score

21. FIRST TEST OFF-SITE
WE HAD GREAT RESULTS THAT HELPED US TO
Opening rate on Pushs vs casual
segmentation
X3,5 X2,5
Opening rate on email vs
casual segmentation
X30 vs general target X27 vs general target

22. PERSONALISATION OF THE HP
Journalists choiceMy home
100
65
63 60
14
cyclisme
esport
tennis football
formule_1

23. TO BE CONTINUED...

24. Thank you!
Head of data marketing – L’Equipe
Romain LHOTE