#Simcity 5 layouts download

EA applied the lessons from the experiment on the SimCity pre-order page to their paid advertising campaigns, yielding exponential results. Testing arms you with information that can increase conversions beyond just your website. Testing gave them the information needed to maximize revenue in a way that would not have been otherwise possible. In EA’s case, the common belief was that promotional offers drive more purchases - this turned out to be false. Even if think you’ve optimized your site, test it out. An A/B testing tool provides real, actionable data to help you better understand how your web properties are performing. A follow-up test on EA’s paid media creatives that mirrored the initial test (removing promotional text from each ad) also increased conversions from highly-qualified ad traffic. Now knowing that the promo banner actually hurt conversions, the Maxis product team decided to apply this information across a larger scope. This was really surprising to us, but it had a pretty significant impact,” Burk said. “We found that the variations with the promotional offer actually performed worse than just a clean version of the page. The Maxis digital marketing team quickly discovered shocking results – the variation with no offer messaging whatsoever drove 43.4% more purchases.

They allocated 100% of site traffic to the experiment in order to find an optimized solution as quickly as possible during the high-traffic SimCity launch period. One variation removed the promotional offer from the page altogether.Īfter building each variation in Optimizely’s visual editor, the team set their experiment goal - clicks on the “Pre-Order” button - to track purchases generated from the test. Each variation corresponded with a hypothesis the team had set beforehand regarding placement, color, and display of the promotional offer. The Maxis team set up an A/B test pitting the original SimCity pre-order landing page against several variations that displayed the promotional offer in different ways. The Maxis team hypothesized that simply moving the call-to-action higher on the page by changing the way the promotional offer was displayed could drive more purchases and increase revenue generated from. While many site visitors were seeing the promotional banner, it’s large size moved the actual call-to-action button down on the page. This prominent placement put the promotion in front of many potential buyers, but according to the Maxis team, was not driving the increase in SimCity pre-orders they had expected. The offer was displayed as a banner across the top of the pre-order page and as part of the ad creative in paid media buys. The Maxis digital marketing team opted to extend a promotional offer in order to drive more pre-orders of the game on.

#Simcity 5 layouts download

Mike Burk, Senior Online Product Manager, MaxisĪs EA prepared to release the new version of SimCity - a launch they knew would attract significant hype - the digital marketing team managing the campaign worked on ways to optimize the SimCity microsite where visitors would purchase or download the game. In the end, this translated to higher revenue for us.” “ Optimizely helped us learn a lot about our users – what’s working and what’s not – so we could make changes on our site to optimize our conversion percentages. Here is the story of how the product team at Maxis, who managed SimCity’s release, used Optimizely to amplify sales. 50% of sales were digital downloads.įor EA, A/B testing was an integral to the release’s digital success. SimCity 5 sold 1.1 million copies in the first two weeks of its launch in March 2013.