Grupo Clarín effectively uses data to shape products, expand audience
Ideas Blog | 06 March 2016
At Grupo Clarín, we are using analytical tools to process Big Data and identify our users’ “digital DNA.” This allows us to identify loyal customers, even anonymous ones, within our very own digital ecosystem.
The digital ecosystem initiative came from the Grupo Clarín strategy group. Our ecosystem is comprised of consumption content (news, politics, sports, entertainment, etc.) and transactional content (classifieds, e-commerce, coupon books, etc.).

This project was implemented in collaboration with the business units AGEA/Clarin.com, La Voz del Interior (the print newspaper), TyCSports (sports television channel) and CMD (Compañia de Medios Digitales).
A combination of logged (registered) users and unregistered (anonymous) users access our Web sites every day. We already have some identified and reliable data for registered users, including age, sex and other basic demographic information. Through analytics provided by Cxense, we can follow these registered users and extract each individual's “digital DNA” to provide more targeted content and services.
With unregistered users, we also often can discover more detailed information about them using tools and software to track and collect their patterns. In turn, the patterns give us more reliable data to develop products for unregistered users.
For example, we can track their browsing patterns (pages viewed, time spent browsing, schedule, etc.) and offer premium content with images, videos, and all the features that Grupo Clarín offers.
These analytical tools also allow a predictive analysis of these individuals, so “tracking” is the same throughout our digital ecosystem.

Practical examples:
- If a user is connected and using our sites for 18 hours, it’s likely they will want to make dinner during this time frame. Our site’s analytical tools gather this information and generate recipe content for the user.
- If a user is consistently visiting our sites to read about the economy and track business and stock information within our ecosystem, the tools provide the user with a 7 a.m. business update.
- Users who closely follow sports content on Mondays receive a summary of weekend sports and the dates of upcoming games from Clarín and Olé TyCSports.
This ability to track and respond to consumption patterns replicates to all users and all categories. We have been able to further customise our digital properties and get a glimpse of our real-time audience.
We have seen considerable growth in navigation metrics (sessions, visitors, page views, navigation time) for all our sites. We have also lowered the bounce rate (rebound rate) and increased the click-through rate on consumption content and transactional content.
Clarin.com news site, affiliated sites , and its sub-sites — including sports, classifieds, and other specialty sites — are now reaching 37.7 million unique users with 120 million visits and 565.4 million page views .
Clarin.com is the top news site with 26.7 million unique visitors, 72.4 million visitors, 264,500,000 page views, and 8.5 million video plays , and with the recommendations from Cxense, all Clarin.com metrics went up.
Our other properties have also seen improved performance:
- La Voz del Interior created 14 segments for commercial and marketing, and their efforts resulted in increased page views.
- The TyCSports
site now reaches more than 12 million homes in Latin America with 17 million page views and nearly 4 million unique users with an increase in average time spent on site and a 6.59% click-through rate on content recommendations.
- We have identified new niche content and services for our users (examples include women’s clothing, animals and pets, among other highly valued niches).
Overall, Grupo Clarín has had many positive results from developing a digital ecosystem, using analytical tools to track users of all kinds, and reacting to those behaviours with new content recommendations.