 | Making Your Competitions Less Cheatable! |
It’s been a while since I started blogging about how to run a competition, so it’s time to add to the collection - currently there’s Part 1 about getting started, Part 2 which is about the competition mechanic, and Do all your entrants visit your site which exposes automated entries potentially damaging your competition. The good news regarding the latter point is that more and more sites, including most recently Tiscali, are using CAPTCHAs to reduce those robotic entries. There are still many more sites that need to follow!
Anyway, Part 3, which should be about rules but won’t be, will reiterate a few points of the previous blogs and comes in response to the Firebox Annual Egg Hunt as highlighted on A4UForum.
Egg Hunts are very popular at this time of year. They are a great way to get a user to look round your website, find some eggs, view your products and become more familiar with your website. However, all egg hunts, in fact all competitions, have one massive weakness - people will share answers on forums.
On the positive side you get a bunch of people making comments and discussing your site, on the downside all the hard work in creating the egg hunt, and some degree of it’s purpose, is perhaps lost. Instead of a ‘hunt’ it merely becomes a click, click, click, leave prize draw. Entrants are on your site and off in a few clicks.
So how to avoid this?
There are a few things you can do! For example randomising the position of one or two eggs - this may involve registration or cookies or some clever coding - but anything is usually possible. On registration a selection of products are chosen at random where eggs will be hidden for that user. Clues can be based on the description of the product, or the clue could be a picture of that product. If each user has a different set of eggs, it means they have to find their unique set and not rely on given out answers.
In short, anything is possible… just challenge your techie to make something cheatproof!
It’s worth noting that making competitions harder to enter may reduce the numbers of entries and you may be happier leaving things as they are, however, here’s another tip to consider, not just for treasure hunts but also run of the mill one question multi choice prize draws.
Many competitions are just a multi choice, often easy, question, so how about asking a second question (or replacing the first one) that has no answer? It could be a tiebreaker (I would love my Egg Soldier Cups at Easter because…) or a skill question (How many Egg Soldier Cups will Firebox sell between now and Easter?). You might well have to judge the answers to make life fair to all entrants which, admittedly, could be time consuming…. but it will mean people have to stop and think about their entry.
However, the best way around stopping your answers being given out is by randomising questions…. and we’ve done this on Loquax by using product feeds. Last year for example we ran an Easter Competition.
By using, in this case, the Thorntons product feed, we could randomise the question (what is the price of…?) for each user. The result is no one can give out the answers and everyone should have to visit Thorntons to find the right price (As prices change/vary the price of the product in the feed is stored in the database at time of entry).
So what’s the conclusion of all this…
Well people will always look for shortcuts to enter your carefully crafted competition, so that means if you want to reward those who genuinely make the effort you need to be carefully crafty!
Use clever coding, randomised questions, tiebreakers, or skill questions to just add an extra element of difficulty to your competition. You might not get as many entries, but at least you know those who have entered have made the effort and hopefully entered your competition in the way you wanted it to work.
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on March 17, 2008 at 11:49 am Nick Gandy wrote:
Nice article.
Also be very careful when creating interactive Flash-based competitions, where the winner of the competition is the person with the highest score. It is usually easy to hack these, unless your techie thinks properly about how to stop the hacks.
A recent example of this was the “Win a holiday to Lapland” that Cosmos ran in Christmas 2007. It was an interactive Flash game promoted nationwide in the press and online. I provided instructions to Cosmos, and the Affiliate Management company, on how easy it was to hack as the top scores were a little suspicious, but maybe not quite enough to ring big alarm bells. The Firefox browser has a simple plug-in whereby you can alter the score that is posted at the end of these games, so be VERY careful with these type of competitions!
It is possible to significantly reduce the possibility of hacking Flash games with a little forethought…
on March 18, 2008 at 10:58 am Naomi wrote:
Hi Jason
Thanks for the very useful article! I think the main problem I have with people posting answers on forums for stuff like our egg hunt is that it takes some of the fun away.
I will have a think about your suggestions for making competitions less cheatable- main problem is I don’t want to force registration, so will look into your alternative suggestions.
And thanks for linking to the hunt- I hope anyone who enters through your link doesn’t feel the need to cheat- it honestly is a lot more fun when you don’t
Naomi
Affiliate Marketing Exec (and egg hunt creator)
Firebox.com