Harvard Business Review Works with 33 Sticks and Adobe to Grow Readership and E-commerce

Starting as not much more than a school publication, nearly 100 years later, Harvard Business Review (HBR) is now published in 12 languages and read globally. Widely regarded as one of the most intelligent publications in the business world, HBR is becoming even smarter with how it learns about its readers, subscribers, potential subscribers, and e-commerce shoppers.

“Like many modern publications, we’re relying more and more on digital business models,” says Carrie Bourke, Director, Customer Analytics and Insights at Harvard Business Review. “It’s important that we use customer intelligence to reach readers and continue to grow our audience.”

By understanding what content specific audiences are reading, which articles are being read completely, and what’s being abandoned, HRB is working to deliver more targeted content to every type of reader. The publication, in partnership with boutique analytics agency 33 Sticks, previously used Google Analytics and Coremetrics to measure interactions, but it simply outgrew those solutions.

Shifting to Adobe Experience Cloud—including Adobe Analytics, Adobe Target, and Adobe Campaign—has expanded HBR’s view of its audiences and put it on the path to taking a more end-to-end approach to marketing. In addition to leveraging capabilities such as Dynamic Tag Management to manage tags of distributed data across systems, HBR is using Anomaly Detection powered by Adobe Sensei to learn patterns and identify sudden spikes or drops in readership, revenue, and page views. All of this is making learning easier, more automated, and more reliable. Most importantly, HBR can do more with what it’s learning.

For example, by seeing with greater granularity if a reader isn’t just coming back to the site, but what types of articles that reader is viewing, HBR can capitalize on that insight. The publication can weave content that’s most interesting for readers together with targeted marketing to create a more enticing experience that encourages readership and sales.

Taking the concept one step further, as HBR interacts with readers, it can measure how those new exchanges help move the needle. Combining advanced analytics with testing is creating a positive feedback loop, where the publisher and e-commerce site can consistently make improvements across its site and channels. Additionally, it can pull data from various resources and channels to further target readers as they navigate across touchpoints—from initial email to signing up for a subscription.

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