Leveraging a Trivia Game for Qualified Traffic and Newsletter Subscribers

Our first step in building the game was to define what we were trying to achieve with it, which was to use it as a conversion tool, attracting new Newsletter subscribers and qualified traffic to the website. To ensure a flawless user experience, we crafted simple user flows with only the features that would bring players back. Of the 90% of visitors who played the game, 25% joined the Newsletter and 36% joined the giveaway.

[Missing data about the players who played for 2 weeks, will come with reporting tool].

1) Preventing cheating

Because this is a weekly trivia game, we had to put in place a few measures to prevent cheating. Therefore, questions are randomized every time they are asked. The question needs to be validated by the system who then sends the next question information, preventing smart users from pulling the data ahead of time. Validation is the only way to know which one is the correct answer, so there is no other way to know than knowledge. We’ve also put a timer in place to prevent users from Googling the correct answer with a 20s limit.

2) Creating recurrence and sharability

The game’s primary purpose is to climb the leaderboard and showcase your achievements. Each week the weekly leaderboard resets and displays the best players of the week and their scores, while the Seasonal leaderboard showcases the best players of all time based on their total participation, average score, and time to answer. The players get their score at the end of each run and are able to share it with their friends using a text-based message to invite them over to play the game.

3) Making the gameplay experience fast

Our goal was to make the game take only 1 – 2 minutes to play, with only 5 questions and 4 answers. This ensures the game mechanics are always the same and very straightforward. We’ve included some optimizations so that the user can go as quickly as they can through the questions; double-tapping submits an answer and tapping again brings up the next question.

With a monthly giveaway, 12 total prizes were to be given away over one year. Each player can join the Giveaway after participating in the Quiz and answering at least one of the weekly Themes. The giveaway window shows up every week for the players who haven’t joined it yet, and they can decide to join it or skip it for later. At the end of each month, a winner will be randomly selected by Insight Vacations for a $1,000 voucher redeemable on their travel plans.

We used the Node.js CMS Strapi in the backend to handle all the Quiz data. Each question and theme can be programmed in advance and published thanks to the Publisher plugin. In the hands of Insight Vacations writers, this allows for the game to run without interruption and anticipate each week’s content to ensure we don’t run out over the duration of the game.

We leveraged the customizability of Strapi to build custom endpoints that would be able to calculate complex data like the Leaderboard entries and the reporting tools we made available inside the Admin panel to follow the game’s statistics. Additionally, users can connect to accounts using a magic-link solution enabled by the Strapi Passwordless plugin and share their unique user identifier across devices. Users are also able to change the name associated with their accounts, and we expect more customization in the future.