Do All Your Competition Entrants Visit Your Site? January 9th, 2008 1:47 pm

How many of you, merchant or affiliate, run competitions on your sites? And how many of you check where your entries actually come from - e.g. IP address and email address? If we told you that your competition entries could be coming from people who never visit your website would you be bothered?

Recently one of our users, who runs their own site, reported a sudden jump in entries to their competition (by a few hundred) all from the following domains @00online.co.uk. @telonline.org.uk and @tisca.co.uk. It’s quite likely that none of these people visited the site to enter, as all entries appeared to stem from an automated service (the ISP may possibly be t-dialin.net).

From Loquax Forums: I have a free prize draw on my website, I normally get a couple of hundred entries a month, I have had over 600 in 12 hours! All of which from the same kind of email address and all only provding the first initial, surname and furst line of an address, all of these are different.

An automated competition service is simply a robot that visits a prize draw site on behalf of a comper who has paid a subscription. It’s the lazy way to enter competitions, and results in zero interaction with your website from that person. Yet, unless you take steps to disallow these things, they can still walkaway with your goodies.

So if you run competitions on your site why not have a check and see when and where your entries are coming from! If you’re happy that a few hundred people who don’t use your website, haven’t even visited it and are probably using an email address you can’t even market to, are entering your promotions - then don’t do anything!

If it’s of concern to you (and you want to run a competition fairly so it’s open to people who make the effort to visit your site), then consider using CAPTCHA images on your forms (to stop robots), randomise your questions, collect IP data from your entries or put a “bulk entries and third party entries will be disqualified” disclaimer in your rules AND then act on it!

I expect that many of you who run competitions don’t pay that much attention to who enters - it’s really about time that you did!

Popularity: 3% [?]

Related Posts So You Want To Run A Competition? - Part 2 Making Your Competitions Less Cheatable! Chocolate Merchant Leaves Bad Affiliate Taste Golden Jigsaw Comes To An Early End! Who Are Ya?

RSS Feed