Diário do Nordeste wanted to know what users were doing on its site. Users were registered, but the company didn’t have a good way to track what they were consuming once inside the news portal.

It also wanted to collaborate more among the newsroom, marketing, and sales departments to drive subscriptions. UX designer Emilia Fortes said they began with the hypothesis that they could build an ecosystem to track, authenticate, identify, and sort reader behaviour.

Diário do Nordeste, a newspaper published in Fortaleza, the capital of the Brazilian state of Ceará, had three product objectives:

• Register a unique user ID for every user who signed up on the Web site, regardless of whether they subscribed.
• Sort users by grouping them based on consumption levels and type of content. Then, Diário do Nordeste could create custom CTAs and subscription offers. “We also wanted to sort the users so we could track if it was the best type to offer a subscription once inside,” Fortes said.
• Create a score for leads in the user funnel and identify moments to offer them a subscription or different content.

Following a road map

Diário do Nordeste then created a road map, which Fortes said had four points:

1. Track user behaviour.
2. Create engagement scoring.
3. Create user IDs.
4. Build the dashboard with the funnel of user sign up and subscriptions.

She said the road map had many different avenues, and they completed the steps except for engagement scoring. “The engagement scoring we couldn’t do, but we started it,” Fortes said. “We now know how engaged a user is inside our Web site. But it isn’t automatic; it’s still a manual thing.”

They were able to track 27 different events of user behaviour throughout the Web site, which was more than they had expected, Fortes said. 

By creating user IDs by using Google Analytics, the team could see what each user was doing inside the Web site. Then it created the dashboard. Diário do Nordeste now has a dashboard that tracks users through the subscription funnels. And the team also better understands loyal users’ behaviours, thanks to Google Analytics.

“We also subscribe to Marfeel Compass so we can take more advantage of actions in real time,” Fortes said.

The team organised the data about users through events it tracked and also created a chart. “We had all this data inside the dashboard, but it was shown in a completely different way that didn’t show us the answer to our questions,” Fortes said. With help from their Facebook Accelerator mentor, Elisabeth Fernandes, they were able to understand more about the engagement of the users on the Web site.

Planning next steps

Next, Diário do Nordeste is learning about how to best use Marfeel Compass, which it began using in September 2021. “We still need to understand and implement it in our daily routine,” Fortes said. She hopes to streamline their user ID objective to make it less labour-intensive on their people resources: “We had a lot of data from our users with the user ID but we still need to automate that analysis,” Fortes said. “Today, it’s manual.”

She wants to continue growing the data-driven culture in the newsroom, including working with editors on how they can use data. But one of the big takeaways for Diário do Nordeste was what to base their reports on.

“We learned we need to do reports based on objectives and not based on the data we want to show,” Fortes said. “We must first think of what question we want to answer and then create a dashboard or a report based on the answer to that question.”

This case study originally appeared in the INMA report, The Benefits and Risks of Media Data Democratisation.

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