All over Europe people are being told to stay home. We have taken a look at our behavioral panel in France to see to what extent the behavior of the people has changed. In France, and especially in Paris, we have been hearing a lot of criticism about people’s behavior. There are too many of us, according to the authorities, who still do not abide to safety procedures such as social distancing. Last week, the media kept showing pictures of people strolling along the sunny banks of the river Seine, or wandering around crowded food markets.

We had a look at our navigation data, where we monitor the online behavior of a part (all volunteers of course) of our French panel¹. As a result, it’s possible to derive an encouraging message, which we can only reiterate: more could surely be done, but a major shift in behavior is already quite apparent in our data.

First, the message has been received: the biggest increase in the number of visits is to institutional websites. Typically, as compared to the days before, we noticed a 2000%² increase in the number of visits on interieur.gouv.fr. News websites have also been read far more than usual. For instance, we have measured a 290% increase on huffingtonpost.fr.

More generally speaking, our data reflects the implementation of the lockdown policies. Kids study at home (1121% increase on the CNED website; where the kids have access to online lessons), their parents work at home (+148% increase on the office365 website; +471% on hp.com, maybe a side effect of the need for a printed version of the laissez-passer). The use of mobility apps has been strongly reduced: number of usages of google maps has been reduced by fourfold since the lockdown, number of usages of waze by threefold…. This obviously reflects the limitation of movement imposed by the new regulations.

Since the beginning of the lockdown, the media has focussed on the increased usage of Netflix, although our data revealed Canal plus, with its temporary free access policy, has benefited from the lockdown more than Netflix. However, based on our data we can see that French people overall seem to have taken the situation very seriously! Go on! #restezchezvous!

One path of improvement is tough. We paid a specific attention to the pages used to access the online form needed for the laissez-passer when going outside. Among a n=1314 national representative (gender, age) sample, 45,3% have visited at least once (average number of visits per visitor: 1,86) one of those pages. But frequency significantly decreases among younger targets (see chart below), and varies depending on the size of the city where they live, and is lower among CSP+. Specific communication actions could address those segments of the population.

Share of the population who visited a “form” related page (per age)

respondi France