FIFA vs Data: Epiphany applies its CRO approach to predict FIFA champions

Our CRO team work by combining psychological research and a deep understanding of user behaviour to analyse data, so we wanted to apply this same approach and principles to FIFA.

How did we do it?

We had a total of 20 participants who all played one game of FIFA whilst we recorded data. We used three sources of data:

• Eye tracking equipment to measure eye movement;
• We hooked up the controller with the computer to track buttons being pressed, which we translated into actions depending whether or not they were in possession of the ball or not;
• Recorded the game statistics from FIFA.

We then analysed all of the data to determine the differences between the better players’ behaviour and the worse players.

By doing this, we could score each attribute and depending on whether the player did this more or less than the average, we awarded a score. This then gave us a score for each player, allowing us to easily rank them.

Four players were then chosen at random to compete in the tournament and given one of the top four teams in the tournament as a team to play with, again, by random.

Why?

We analyse extensive sets of data every day from a variety of sources to enable us to understand user behaviour online, and then feed this analysis into changes to our client’s websites to improve user experience and conversion.

We wanted to test our ability to gather data, analyse and establish testable hypotheses from any source to make an informed choice – in this case, who would be the FIFA champion.

And of course, we wanted to play a bit of FIFA!

So, what happened?

Four keen FIFA players from our team each represented a country to thrash it out in the FIFA tournament.

Our CRO team used the data collected to predict that both Chris and Sean would make the final, with Sean winning the league and overall final. So let’s see what happened…

So there you have it, Sean and Chris did make the final, Sean did win the league, but he lost out to Chris in the last moment for overall champion!

We’re constantly testing our theories and challenging ourselves to see how we can enhance our CRO strategies for clients. So with the Euro’s starting and football fever well and truly taking hold, we applied our approach of collecting data, creating and a hypothesis and using this to predict certain outcomes, to the game of FIFA.

The fact that Sean and Chris made the final and Sean did win the league proves that our approach to predict user behaviour and outcomes does work (let’s forget about Sean’s slip up at the end!) and therefore that we can adapt our client’s websites and user journey’s to align with how we know their audience behaves and what they want online.

Mike Ellis is head of CRO at Epiphany.