Unidad Editorial: increasing click-through rates by 50 percent
Key highlights
Category
Media & Entertainment/ Digital Marketing
Location
Headquarters: Madrid, Spain
Solution highlights
- Modern Data Platform: Cloudera Enterprise
- Workloads: Data Warehouse
- Key Components: Apache Impala, Apache Hive, Apache Spark, Cloudera Manager
- Databases: mySQL, Neo4j, Oracle
- BI & Analytics Tool: QlikView
Applications supported
- Advertising
- Marketing
Data sources
- Ad server data
- Web analytics data
- Content management system (CMS) data
- Digital data from Chartbeat, comScore, and others
- Historical daily snapshots of subscriptions,couponing, distribution and sales data from data warehouse
Impact
- 50 percent average increase in the click through-rates for segmented ad campaigns
- Five times increase in conversion rate for successful subscriptions
- Grew profitability with delivery of new services and customized content
- Increased subscription sales
Big data scale
- 800 TB and growing about 90 TB per month
Unidad Editorial, a leading multimedia communication group in Spain, is able to more accurately target subscription campaigns, personalize online ads and content, and improve click-through rates, lead acquisition, and final conversion for ad campaigns with an advanced analytics platform from Cloudera.
Unidad Editorial is a leading multimedia communication group in Spain, widely known for its newspapers EL MUNDO, EXPANSIÓN, and MARCA. More than 24 million people read Unidad Editorial digital content monthly, with 2.4 billion page views served every month.
Challenge
Unidad Editorial wanted to more accurately target subscription campaigns, personalize online ads and content, and improve click-through rates, lead acquisition, and final conversion for ad campaigns. But to achieve these goals, the company needed to modernize its data platform so it could analyze more than 90 terabytes (TB) of new data a month generated across its digital media environments.
“Traditional data management platforms are not flexible enough to handle the huge volume of data or the ad-hoc analytics that we need,” said Roberto Álvarez, chief data officer, Unidad Editorial.
Solution
Unidad Editorial deployed a modern data platform, powered by Cloudera, for advanced analytics. The platform processes, analyzes, and standardizes more than three terabytes (TB) of unstructured data daily, collected in near-real time. In all, more than 800 TB of historical data on user browsing activities, ad interactions, product usage, and more is stored and analyzed via the platform.
For example, its digital ad team uses the information to help deliver personalized ads. “When readers land on our websites, we can get to know their interests and provide them with customized ads based on their historical behavior on our websites,” said Luis Hidalgo, head of Data Science at Unidad Editorial.
Implementation
According to Roberto Álvarez, while many media companies focus on creating a data management platform designed specifically for managing online advertising campaigns, Unidad Editorial sought to implement an enterprise data hub that could turn data into an asset across the company.
“By combining all the data together in a single data hub, we can create a new market asset and offer a source of knowledge to every business area, including sales, subscriptions, distributions and operations,” said Roberto Álvarez.
For example, Unidad Editorial can now identify locations where there is high product demand but no point of sale nearby to fulfill the demand and it has improved cross-selling based on past purchases.
Results
With improved audience targeting, click-through rates for online ads have significantly increased. “We’ve recorded a 50 percent average increase in the click-through rate of our segmented ad campaigns,” said Luis Hidalgo.
Additionally, more insight into readers has enabled Unidad Editorial to better customize content and deliver new information services, driving increased profitability for the company. “Big data has helped us to better understand our readers and create new market channels and new solutions we can monetize,” said Roberto Álvarez. “We’ve increased the conversion rate for successful subscriptions by five times as a result of the new insights.”