Case Study: Le Monde achieves 12% increase in engine traffic and recovers up to 15% of ad-blocked visitors with Piano Analytics

Driving content strategy with an analytics approach

Le Monde, France’s most widely read newspaper and operator of lemonde.fr, faced the challenge of preserving journalistic excellence while completing a digital transformation. They needed to maintain rapid, precisely timed news output, embed a data-driven culture across teams, and accurately measure a fragmented, multi-device audience that included both identified and anonymous users.

Using Piano Analytics, Le Monde gained comprehensive, never‑sampled data that guided content production, timing and distribution—shifting from flow-driven publishing to strategically staggered slots (e.g., evenings/weekends for lifestyle, mornings for finance, Sunday evenings for social). The analytics-led push strategy improved mailing performance (+13% clicks per push), recovered 5–15% of traffic lost to ad blockers, and helped drive a 12% increase in engine traffic in 2019 vs. 2018, while respecting user privacy with a trusted third‑party solution.

Le Monde

Pierre Buffet

Head of Digital Studies