A media company with different brands should understand each brand won’t have the same focus or goals. This is part of the data culture being created at El Comercio in Peru. 

Some of its brands are starting to focus on subscriptions, some are focusing on registration models, and some on general traffic or pageviews.

“Not all users are just viewers, users, or subscribers,” Giulianna Carranza, manager of data and analytics at El Comercio, told attendees at last week’s INMA Latin American Conference, sponsored by the Google News Initiative. “We’re trying to understand what is the entire framework we can work with so we can have a 360 view of what is going on in our content.” 

This way Comercio can apply technology into its products and within the company.

The media company has three pillars to determine the value of the data: Content, readers, and conversion rates.

“We have to be careful here because when I’m talking of conversion, I’m not only thinking of subscriptions. I'm also referring to material in general because it all helps with monetisation,” Carranza said. “The three pillars are closely connected, synchronised, and collaborate together when it comes to work groups and who is working in those groups. We had a model where each one was in its own zone and it was very isolated.” 

Pillar 1: Content

Media companies need to connect the news and media world with the business world, and data is what helps integrate El Comercio into this collaborative world: “We’ve learned data journalism is an alternative to premium content,” Carranza said.

Comercio works together with data, technology, and news teams. Each team extrapolates the data, and they can determine what kind of content they’re creating, for example, a premium article or a free article. 

“We have special articles where we can measure the conversion rates where we can identify the number of pages the average reader is reading,” Carranza said. “With premium content, the reader needs to be able to identify that it’s more in-depth content. It has research, it has data, it has something that you’re actually going to learn something from.”

In Peru, data scientists and data journalists are not readily available. El Comercio has to train them themselves. Together, they are always learning something new and adjusting projects as they learn more.

“Something we’ve learned a lot is the value of data,” Carranza said. “All media is not capitalising on structured data like videos.”

El Comercio sees great value in smart videos and wanted to implement it in their journalism: “We have a smart storage where we can access our data,” Carranza said. “We can classify stories that are covered every day, and we can identify that very easily.” 

This way other people can access and make good use of the content. This helps El Comercio drive teamwork. They share what they’re working on and share the content. No matter where team members are located, they can access the database. This helps them develop and improve journalism by the sheer access provided. 

“This smart storage practice has allowed us to research different mechanisms of facial recognition where we can train different models that find certain faces or images,” Carranza said.

For example with a political story, the smart storage has the capability to look back and locate video of that person: “This can help us develop an article with a lot more detail, a lot more efficiency and in a lot less time,” Caarranza said.

Pillar 2: Readers

El Comercio knows it can’t understand its readers if it doesn’t really know them: “If we don’t know what their patterns of behaviour are, we don’t know how they use our products,” Carranza said.

Each brand in the group and each user profile is different. El Comercio had to start with data that can profile readers. 

“We have identified their patterns, preferences, their segments and of course an analysis of their entire profile,” Carranza said.

El Comercio gives everyone in the company access to the database. This allows data to flow from one department to another: “This allows us to get a 360 view of what is going on with our user,” Carranza said.

Pillar 3: Conversion rates

To calculate how effective the articles are, El Comercio looks at conversion rates.

The first behaviour they track is when anonymous users become registered users. They’ll eventually hit a paywall and hopefully become subscribers. With access to premium content, El Comercio hopes the user becomes a loyalist and even recommends the articles they’re reading to other people who then go on the same conversion journey. 

The editorial team can make adjustments and control the traffic knowing what works and what doesn’t based on real data.

El Comercio urges media companies to always ask: “What is the goal?” Is it traffic, monetisation, conversion, or loyalty? There’s no wrong answer as long as it works. All of these goals bring revenue to the company.

Complete conference coverage can be found here.

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