How Vogue’s international approach to audience data helped it reach record readers

There are 26 international iterations of Condé Nast’s Vogue and what’s become evident at the end of 2020, as the coronavirus crisis continues its disruptions, is that the iconic fashion brand’s global audiences have key similarities that Vogue has identified — and put to very good use.

Of course, these audience behaviors started at different points of time as each country felt the impacts of the pandemic and subsequently went into lockdown. But because of that, Sarah Marshall, who has been guiding audience development for the international editions of Vogue for the past three-plus years, said that her team was able to see patterns and know what to expect from readers’ daily habits. That then enabled her team to act on those behaviors and reach record readership.

Condé Nast runs 11 owned-and-operated Vogue titles, including the editions in the U.S., France, Japan and Italy. Beyond that, there are three editions that the company publishes with joint support from other corporations and 15 international editions that are licensed out to other publishers.

Traffic to Vogue’s 11 endemic sites is up 40% year over year from November 2019 to November 2020, according to Marshall, reaching a record high of a combined 58 million unique visitors last month. On its own, the U.S. title accumulated 16 million unique visitors that month.

One of the biggest changes in audience behavior that Marshall said she found was the initial two-week decline in readership in the evenings for all of the Vogue sites.

“In the backend of 2019, we found that for every single Vogue [site globally], they had peak traffic in the evening for both loyal audiences [those who visit the same Vogue site four or more times per month] and fly by audiences,” said Marshall, with a peak at 10 p. m. local time.

But in the 12th and 13th weeks of the year (weeks of March 16 and 23), there was a significant drop off of people who came to Vogue sites, likely due to people being glued to news outlets to get updates on the coronavirus crisis.