How The Economist Gets Insights in Seconds, Saving Analysts Hours

Insight/Action/Outcome: Facing intense competition and an inability to deliver timely answers, The Economist’s data team was overwhelmed with requests. By switching to Amplitude’s consolidated platform for analytics and experimentation, the publication cut decision-making time from days to seconds and enabled teams to solve crucial, long-standing problems, such as feature retention.

This isn’t your grandmother’s news business. Subscription news has always been competitive, but today’s publishers also face competition from alternative sources like generative AI and social media. Of the many options available, loyal readers continue to choose The Economist.

The Economist began in 1843 as a weekly print newspaper, and we have transitioned into a modern, digital entity that offers content through our website, app, newsletters, podcasts, and videos. We exist to serve our 1.2 million active paid subscribers who value high-quality journalism and its role in helping people understand the world.

We track success through marketing ROI, subscription conversions, subscriber churn, and customer lifetime value, but my role as Chief Data Officer involves looking at the bigger picture rather than individual numbers. My team of 50 provides analysis, insights, machine learning models, dashboards, and consumer research to support high-level, org-wide decisions.

However, our goal to make The Economist part of every subscriber’s daily routine faced an unexpected and frustrating challenge: our own data infrastructure.

Questions that raced ahead of answers

Our biggest obstacle was speed. Simply put, the business asked questions faster than we could analyze data and offer answers. Getting analysis from an analyst, data scientist, or BI developer could take anywhere from a few hours to several months, and the lag time caused us to miss out on potential opportunities.

In addition to struggling with analytics, we used about six different data tools across teams. This lack of standardization made it hard to experiment, so we couldn’t run as many tests as we wanted. When launching something new on our website, we often had to hope it would work, without data to back up our decisions.

Having so many tools siloed our teams and led to inconsistent data. Without a shared way to communicate, collaboration became complicated and we missed important details.

Consolidating tools to improve data quality and usability

The only way forward was to replace The Economist’s existing tool stack with a single platform. Our objective: a drastic change in the quality, depth, and speed of analytics and experimentation to dramatically improve operational and strategic decision making.

Amplitude was the right fit for several reasons:

• The data governance is among the best of any platform out there. Although it may not sound exciting, ensuring high data quality and usability is crucial.
• A strongly integrated workflow means we can leverage Analytics, Experimentation, Session Replay, and Guides and Surveys to spot customer pain points, create new experiments, track results, and view replays of user behavior in a centralized location. That seamlessness dramatically reduces users’ cognitive load throughout the entire insight and experimentation lifecycle, which is key to driving platform adoption.
• AI-enabled features make the process even smoother, whether by interpreting a confusing chart, monitoring a critical dashboard, or delivering alerts directly to Slack.

To avoid the common problem of low long-term adoption, we focused on user support and training during our Amplitude rollout. Around 100 people took more than 1,000 courses from Amplitude Academy before launch, along with onsite training.

The biggest enabler, however, was creating an internal Center of Excellence to offer ongoing support through templates, playbooks, and regular training. The Amplitude team’s skill and diligence were integral to our success in building a competent, confident user base.

Self-serve analytics deliver results in seconds

The size, breadth, and enthusiasm of our Amplitude user base swelled quickly. Within weeks of launching Amplitude, our business users were performing sophisticated behavioral, cohort, and customer journey analysis. Today, we have around 200 active monthly users across a broad range of functions: editorial, marketing, retention, technology, customer engagement, product management, and our insight and data team.

This widespread adoption delivered immediate, measurable ROI: questions that used to take days with an analyst now have answers in seconds, saving our analytics team hundreds of hours per month. And in contrast to relying on our previously scattered tools (which offered conflicting data), Amplitude has become our single source of truth.

Each month, we set new records for Amplitude activity, signaling a major change in how business users access analytics and the quality of those insights. We see a corresponding improvement in the strength and confidence in our decision-making capabilities, and we’re also well ahead of The Economist’s financial expectations from the implementation.

The most important breakthrough for me was finally solving a critical, long-standing problem: feature retention. We’ve launched many new features to improve the user experience, but it was always hard to tell which ones kept users coming back after the initial excitement. Amplitude revealed valuable insights into which features have become part of our customers’ daily routines, giving us the knowledge we need to prioritize our efforts.

A 180-year-old business gains a modern edge

By investing in Amplitude, The Economist turned real customer experiences into real business benefits. The platform is powerful and easy to use, supporting every part of our analytics and experimentation. It’s become essential to how we understand and retain our subscribers.

The business has leapt years forward in the quality and speed of our decision making as a result. Teams that historically didn’t work together now converge and collaborate on Amplitude as their platform of choice. Amplitude brings the business together, and we can compete like never before.