Groupe Le Monde: Leveraging Looker for ad data that's fresh, interactive, and easy to access
About Groupe Le Monde
With a turnover of more than €320 million, Groupe Le Monde is the foremost newspaper publisher in France. Its publications include the iconic daily newspapers Le Monde, L'Obs, Télérama, and Courrier International.
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Wanting more clarity over its programmatic and digital advertising, Groupe Le Monde and M Publicité chose Looker with BigQuery to drive effective monetization and improve the reader experience.
Google Cloud results
- Empowers sales, marketing, and ops teams to explore ad data by simplifying the creation of customized dashboards
- Supports the digital ad team in making data-driven choices with fast reporting, available in seconds not hours
- Opens up the door to new ways of working with ad partners, thanks to easy scalability
- Enables the digital ads team to pivot to value-added analysis instead of data gathering for reports
Delivers insights faster with reports ready in seconds
Did you know that Le Monde was one of the first French newspapers on the web? The LeMonde.fr website launched in 1995 and currently has 300,000 digital subscribers. It has big ambitions for the future, aiming to reach 1 million digital subscribers by 2025. As readers increasingly browse the news on their desktops and phones, this digital strategy is crucial to making sure Le Monde maintains its position as France's most widely read broadsheet.
To access daily articles, as well as a digital archive stretching back to 1944, Le Monde readers can choose from individual or family subscriptions. And for those wanting the freshest stories, there's an option providing early access to news at 11 AM every day. The key to this strategy’s success? Creating a digital offering that reflects the high quality that readers associate with Le Monde. This approach reinforces readers’ loyalty and maintains their trust.
Like many publishing houses, Groupe Le Monde's "freemium" approach blends both paper and digital editions, and combines subscription revenue with revenue from advertising. "At Groupe Le Monde, we have the same objective across all our titles apart from HuffPost: to provide the best reader experience, and to gain as many subscribers as possible," says Sébastien Noel, Director of Programmatic, Adtech and Monetization. "To do that, we need to nurture our relationship with our readers. That's why we moved the Le Monde website infrastructure to Google Cloud in 2018, and that's also our goal in the way we work with our advertising partners."
"Not only are readers moving from print to digital, they're also moving to smaller screens, so we have to make our advertising as efficient as possible. To maintain and even increase our revenue, we need to give teams easy access to the right data, and that's why we're using Looker on Google Cloud."
—Sébastien Noel, Director of Programmatic, Adtech & Monetization, Groupe Le Monde, M PublicitéThree years ago, Groupe Le Monde and its media sales house, M Publicité, brought the organization’s digital advertising sales team in-house so it could better tailor the adverts on its site to its readers. "Groupe Le Monde had been working with 15 external ad tech vendor partners to sell inventory, but they were potentially talking to the same advertisers, with unknown rates and no transparency," explains Sébastien. The goal? To become more efficient on the programmatic advertising side of its digital advertising and increase monetization, as well as improve the reader experience. To fulfill that role and provide more control over the ads appearing on the site, it built its own architecture called Forecast for Ads.
The next step was to make ad data easily accessible to internal teams by gathering it in one place, to help revenue and campaign optimization. After its previous dashboarding solution failed to deliver data reports quickly enough, the team selected the Looker business intelligence (BI) and analytics platform on Google Cloud as the right tool to provide an integrated data experience that could adapt to existing workflows.
"Not only are readers moving from print to digital, they're also moving to smaller screens, so we have to make our advertising as efficient as possible," says Sébastien. "To maintain and even increase our revenue, we need to give teams easy access to the right data, and that's why we're using Looker on Google Cloud."
Choosing Looker for a data platform that's easy to use and ready to grow
The digital ads team's previous attempt to create a dashboard for its programmatic advertising feeds didn't meet its requirements. Part of the problem was that a number of departments all wanted to use the platform for multiple insights and reports to inform their decision-making, but that data wasn't available in a direct, interactive way. "The sales team wanted to dashboard the revenue, the marketing team wanted viewability KPIs, and the operations team wanted campaign KPIs," says Sébastien. "It became complicated, and the solution we were using wasn't able to harmonize the data sources we use." The second issue was that reports were slow to load. "You could make yourself a coffee and have a chat with a colleague before the results were ready," he jokes.
After Sébastien joined Groupe Le Monde in 2019, the team decided to look for an alternative dashboarding solution. "We based our decision on three main criteria," he says. "It needed to be easy to scale, as the team is small and doesn't have resources for engineering; it needed to be fast; and it needed to be ready to grow with us." After carrying out a proof of concept with Looker and another leading provider, the team selected Looker as it could be integrated with BigQuery to build the highly scalable, cost-effective data warehouse it needed to support fast access to its data.
"The advantage of using Looker with BigQuery is that it's very easy to use. With very little training, we’re able to build custom dashboards in Looker, and we can easily scale up and add new datasets in BigQuery."
—Sébastien Noel, Director of Programmatic, Adtech & Monetization, Groupe Le Monde, M PublicitéGetting up and running in just six weeks, with support from SFEIR
M Publicité works with Google Ad Manager to sell directly to advertisers and agencies, as well as 11 partners for its programmatic auction sales. The first step of the project was to integrate the programmatic data from these feeds, which is now fed into BigQuery, where it is harmonized into usable datasets. "The advantage of using Looker with BigQuery is that it's very easy to use," says Sébastien. "With very little training, we’re able to build custom dashboards in Looker, and we can easily scale up and add new datasets in BigQuery."
In order to get the implementation right, the digital ads team received support from SFEIR, a Google Cloud implementation partner. A SFEIR technician spent two weeks working with the BI team at Groupe Le Monde to identify its needs and make sure it chose the most appropriate Google Cloud products for the job. SFEIR was also in touch daily to provide support on key Looker functions such as setting up alerts and customizing dashboards. "We managed to complete the initial implementation for our programmatic data in six weeks," says Sébastien. "We had planned to integrate five data sources—Google, smart, Xandr, Rubicon, Index—but we were able to do it so quickly that we ended up integrating 11 of the sources we use."
"We have better yield management and are better able to track really specific KPIs, but the biggest gain has been our internal communications. Data reports are easy to produce and understand, so teams are empowered to produce the reports they need, such as visualizing revenue by media agency."
—Sébastien Noel, Director of Programmatic, Adtech & Monetization, Groupe Le Monde, M PublicitéDelivering fresh data for faster insights and more targeted ads
Since switching to Looker, running a report on Groupe Le Monde's programmatic data takes seconds, rather than minutes or even hours. "Previously, for certain reports, someone had to gather information in a spreadsheet, which took a couple of hours," says Sébastien. "Now, once the database is in BigQuery, it's ready in a couple of clicks." That has also freed up at least one team member to work on BI rather than producing reports.
"We have better yield management and are better able to track really specific KPIs, but the biggest gain has been our internal communications,” shares Sébastien. “Data reports are easy to produce and understand, so teams are empowered to produce the reports they need by themselves, such as visualizing revenue by media agency."
The next step for the project will be to integrate direct sales data alongside programmatic ads data as well as web analytics data, creating a single point of reference. "Once we do that, we'll be able to use the data to inform decisions on lead management and rates," says Sébastien.
Based on the success it has seen so far, the team also plans to start using Looker to release campaign reports to clients. "Looker has opened up the possibility of new features that weren't possible before, such as delivering enhanced reports to clients and visualizing data about user segments," says Sébastien. "We’re even considering managing our Google Ad Manager campaigns by using Looker alerts to automatically notify us when we reach certain KPIs," says Sébastien.
"Ultimately, being able to offer more data to our partners will lead to more targeted ads, which also enhances the user experience," he adds. "We're really looking forward to having a more holistic, integrated BI reporting platform and exploring how Google Cloud can further enhance our digital advertising vision, getting us a step closer to our million-subscriber goal."
Tell us your challenge. We're here to help.
Contact us
About Groupe Le Monde
With a turnover of more than €320 million, Groupe Le Monde is the foremost newspaper publisher in France. Its publications include the iconic daily newspapers Le Monde, L'Obs, Télérama, and Courrier International.
About SFEIR
SFEIR is a community of more than 450 developers, offering innovative technological solutions to small and large businesses.