Case Study: South Australian Tourism Commission (SATC)

Published: November 2025

Overview

As marketers increasingly invest in experimentation and personalisation, the ability to rapidly achieve statistical significance with greater precision and confidence has become more critical than ever. Concurrently, evolving privacy regulations and browser limitations have rendered traditional identity solutions less effective.

To tackle these challenges, the South Australian Tourism Commission (SATC) tested integrating AdFixus IDs with Optimizely, a leading experimentation platform. The objective was straightforward: accelerate existing experiments significantly by employing a superior, durable privacy-first identity solution, without altering the experimental design itself.

The Problem

SATC had been conducting A/B tests using Optimizely’s default identity configurations, which relies on third-party signals. Consequently, experiments required large sample sizes and prolonged timeframes to reach statistical significance. This hindered swift decision-making and reduced marketing agility.

Experiment Goal

The original goal of the experiment was to assess whether a change in layout would affect user conversion rates. The result indicated a slight improvement, but the experiment struggled to quickly achieve statistical significance.

The Solution: Privacy-First Identity with AdFixus

AdFixus IDs offer a privacy-compliant, first-party identifier, ensuring accurate user recognition across multiple sessions without dependence on third-party cookies or browser fingerprinting.

By simply reconfiguring Optimizely’s default identity system of third-party cookies with AdFixus IDs, without altering the underlying experiment, SATC aimed to:

• Improve the quality and precision of user-level data.

• Dramatically accelerate the attainment of statistical significance.

• Strengthen confidence in the accuracy of experiment results.

Key Insight

Switching from Optimizely’s default identity to AdFixus IDs delivered a significant reduction in random error, with the revised experiment achieving a similar level of statistical precision with 87% fewer visitors. This change enabled dramatically accelerated experimentation cycles, facilitating quicker, data-driven decisions without changing the experimental design.

Why This Matters

In a privacy-first digital ecosystem, robust and accurate identity solutions are fundamental for effective experimentation. The SATC experience highlights how integrating AdFixus IDs with platforms like Optimizely can:

• Sharply reduce experiment durations

• Significantly improve measurement reliability

• Maximize insights from smaller, consented audience pools

Conclusion

Privacy-compliant, first-party identifiers like AdFixus IDs substantially enhance business agility through faster and more precise experimentation. For marketers striving for efficient, high-quality experimentation, the Optimizely-AdFixus integration represents an ideal architecture for privacy-aware optimization at scale.

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