Traiteur Dev Blog #15: PAX Rejection, A Postmortem

Hi there! Our blog post was delayed a day because we wanted to give a really nice breakdown of what we did last week.

If you follow us, you’ll know that we were rejected from showing our game at PAX, which was quite disappointing.

That didn’t stop us — so we built our own booth!

Here’s a breakdown of how it went.

From Thursday, September 1st – Monday, September 5th, we had just over 1700 visitors to our virtual booth

to our Of these visitors, roughly 80 signed up for our newsletter (about a 5% conversion, not bad!),

for our newsletter (about a 5% conversion, not bad!), Over 600 watched our cheesy pitch video

our cheesy pitch video Around 500 downloaded their free swag, a wallpaper — meaning nearly everyone who watched the video came back to get their swag!

their free swag, a wallpaper — meaning nearly everyone who watched the video came back to get their swag! We did a reddit AMA over Sunday and Monday, which gave a significant boost to traffic (about 50% came from reddit!)

It was a load of fun to watch all of this from our PJs, but it paved the way for another thought: Did we do better than if we were -actually- there on the show floor?

There are a lot of factors to consider (i.e. people passing by the booth but not stopping by, among other things), but let’s assume people spent just a minute or two at a booth, and our KPI (key performance indicator) is people learning about the game.

PAX was open a total of 51 hours over four days.

If the average person came up and spent two minutes at our booth (average time spent on the page was 1:23, and in local events people have spent longer, so we’ll assume 2 minutes), we would get 30 per hour.

Multiplied by 51, that’s 1530 possible people who could have come by the booth and learned about the game had we been there in person — by doing what we did, we got in front of more people than those who could have possibly spent time at a booth on the show floor, and with far less competition for attention!

Of course, being at PAX would have been great, and this is a very simple look at how things could have gone. But as I said last week, I don’t let anyone dictate my ability to be successful — we had to do something, and I think we responded in the best possible way!

What would I have done differently? Next time, I would definitely have included social buttons to capture more of our traffic and keep people in touch, as it’s less work to follow us on Twitter than signing up for a newsletter.

On top of that, I would create some kind of customized Twitter/Facebook social share option to let the world know you stopped by the booth. Given our conversion of people who signed up for the newsletter, roughly 5%, that could still be a sizable dent in impressions and future conversions coming from that.

Overall, I was extraordinarily pleased with how this turned out. We promoted the game, we got more people aware of Raconteur, and we did something that was a lot of fun — I mean just look at my fabulous pink jacket!

Tune in next week for more Traiteur goodness. Thanks for dropping by, and I hope you enjoyed it!

-Nick

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