Ubisoft Increased CTR Using VWO

As the Associate Director of Digital Marketing, Jenny Hughes leads a team of web producers responsible for all of Ubisoft’s game marketing website and display media campaigns for North, Central and South America.

While working on the digital marketing campaign for Tom Clancy’s The Division, Jenny’s team started investing a lot of resources into rich game information and interactive content on their marketing website to educate and spread awareness of their new IP. These sections had multiple updates throughout the course of the campaign, and Jenny saw an opportunity to be doing more than displaying a “COMING SOON” message to their website visitors. In fact, Ubisoft’s research has shown that the primary reason why people visited their website was to find more information about particular games offered by the company. 

This is when they realized that Ubisoft needed to find smarter and faster ways to give quicker updates about various games to its subscribers.

The team then discovered VWO Engage and decided to try it out for two months. After the trial, and happy with the results, they chose VWO Engage to be their push notification service provider.

Ubisoft’s primary goal of increasing the number of returning visitors to their websites was fulfilled with VWO Engage, whether that was to fuel consideration during a pre-launch campaign, or sustain player interest when new content become available in the game, post-launch.

From push notifications, Ubisoft websites get an average click rate of 17%. This is a big deal compared to the average click rate of most emails, which is between 2 to 4%. VWO Engage doubled and even quintupled what Ubisoft’s initial expectations were!

One important aspect that Jenny’s team considered was the frequency at which they sent push notifications, which would be dependent upon the communication calendar of a given game. From a user experience perspective it was important to send only meaningful and valuable notifications to Ubisoft’s users, which nets out to be around 2 to 4 every week for games with healthy communication cycles. The team also observed that their highest click rate came from game announcements, with an astounding best click rate to be at 31%!

What excited Jenny the most about push notifications is the line of personal, direct communication her team could now have with the subscribers. “Being able to talk to our users on their browsers in real time is great for communicating details on live events or limited time offers,” says Jenny.

As for Ubisoft’s favorite feature, though they are yet to try it out, the Segment Creator takes pole position. “We offer a lot of varied game features and opportunities for our games that might not appeal to every player. Being able to create segments around site behavior can help make informed decisions on this, and a more personalized communication strategy will be our key moving forward.”

A Tip for Push Notification Users

For Jenny, her first notification itself was successful, reporting high click rates and website engagement, with results that superseded their initial expectations. However, she has a suggestion for all those people who implement push notifications for their websites – try and test out a few notifications to your users to analyze the results before rolling out at scale.