Running a quiz - a short Retrospective
A bit more than a month ago, I published my web developer quiz at - now it’s time to note down some insights I gathered since launching the quiz:
The facts
The quiz was launched on Friday, 13th of September 2013 around 20:00 which could have been a bad choice so short before the weekend. But it worked and many visitors found the quiz:
So far, Google Analytics has seen 653 unique visitors from the three top countries Switzerland (37.7%), United Kingdom (17.4%) and Germand (16.5%). This is remarkably, since I don’t really know anyone from the UK :-)
Looking at the traffic sources, Facebook is leading before Google+. But looking at the “conversion rate”, the traffic source with the highest conversion rate of about 20% is the intranet of a swiss web agency - followed by Google+ (6.6% conversion) and Facebook (3.0% conversion).
Looking at the single levels of the quiz, I guess the difficulty level was not growing linearly from level to level and I think this point can be improved for version two of the quiz. This is very well visible in the Goal Funnel Visualization in Google Analytics, were e.g. Level 4 was completed by around 90% of the participants - where the other levels seemed more difficult. Anyway, the overall completion rate is 3.4% so far - and everyone still has the chance to change this!
Today, I had the honor to add winner number 30 to the hall of fame! Congratulations to everyone that made it to the end and is now in the Hall of Fame!
Some of the participants seem to be a bit paranoid and that’s my explanation that the Google Analytics numbers might not be 100% accurate - but I was tooo lazy to add server-side counting of the single steps and so I just don’t care too much :-)
Some random thoughts and notes
- There seem to be a bunch of nit-pickers among the quiz participants that “complain” about details I’ve not thought of - this led to a bunch of changes that were applied to the quiz after the launch
- Looking at the webserver logs, I see many users looking at a humans.txt file which was not existing - now it does and I hope it helps you :-)
- Having a setup to quickly roll-out little fixes and enhancements was very helpful - it always pays out to automate things
- Updating the hall of fame list manually is not yet optimized on the technical side (rendering the list right from the database would be nicer) - noted for v2
- Testing with several participants as beta-testers and on different webservers (for the master-challenge) is not enough… (see first point of this list…)
- Some guy(s) have started to brute-force in a level - sorry guys, you didn’t succeed
- Some guy seemed to have given the solutions to his work-mate which submitted the solution to the master-level within almost the same minute, from the same IP, without going through the prior steps - sorry guys, there are some checks in place to verify final submissions…
Conclusion for now
I’m still happy to see the number of participants grow - and I still wait for the day where the quiz is mentioned somewhere and get’s a crazy increase in participants. There are some notes already for a second edition. I’m just looking at it and wait for the next winning notification mail :-) Keeep on rocking!