Do Lead Programs Suffer From Automated Affiliates?

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9 Comments August 14, 2008 / Posted in Affiliate Marketing, Competitions

We received an email today from a siteowner who received 20,000 entries to their competition. Now 20,000 entries isn’t to be sniffed at, and many a big brand would be most pleased with this kind of result - except not one of those 20,000 people actually visited the competition website to enter their details. It was all done by an automated entry service.

So that’s 20,000 people totally ignoring your promotion, your website, your sponsors and hoping to blag a prize with an email account that they’re not using - so they’ll ignore your marketing messages too!

You can avoid this kind of issue by taking a few simple steps, being vigilant, adding a line of text in your rules that says “no automated entries” and then disqualifying them if required.

However, if a company can generate 20,000 competition entries at the drop of a hat, does this mean that similar methods are being employed in affiliate marketing.

Take a Random Scenario

A merchant sets up a program offering 50p per lead for name, address and email fields. There’s no CAPTCHA involved and no double opt-in confirmation required. What’s to stop an affiliate running a script, taking their mailing list, and plugging it in to that merchant’s system? Has it happened? Is it monitored? Can it happen?

In the competition world few promoters are vigilant to automation - it does make me wonder whether the same issue is a problem in AM?

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Clarke said on August 14th, 2008 at 4:21 pm

Yes it happens, but the good news is that most Networks these days are able to deal with the people doing it and void all the leads. Not going to go in to the details of what to look for as you might as well just print a list telling doggy affiliates what to do and what is checked for so they can avoid it, but yes like every industry scammers exist and they need to be dealt with.

It would really help Merchants on leads based programs if they added a simple word check to the sign-up process, heck even the maths question to reply to this thread is more security than most sites have.
Stephen Kinsey said on August 14th, 2008 at 9:27 pm

Your post made me check some of my recent competitions and surely enough some of these auto entry bots are there. I think they’ve only just started hitting my comps as the patterns are so obvious that I would have noticed them before when picking winners.

I’ve set my comps now to require registration, hopefully that will deter them. The worst thing about this is it’s so unfair on those genuine people that come to your site every day and manually enter the competitions.
Jason said on August 14th, 2008 at 11:26 pm

Thanks for that Stephen. Forcing registration and/or using CAPTCHA stuff can help - plus add in your rules that you disqualify automated and bulk entries.

Hopefully the word will continue to spread amongst site owners and competition promoters.

Jason
Stephen Kinsey said on August 15th, 2008 at 11:21 am

Thanks Jason, I just blogged about this myself to do my part in spreading the word.

Are you using registration and captcha together on your competitions or is the registration itself enough of a deterrent?
Jason said on August 15th, 2008 at 1:54 pm

Fortunately we don’t get targeted (I doubt these comp services want to send us their subscribers so we can point out that they’re paying to be disqualified).

However, it’s something we’ve been aware of for some time now - it effects promoters and the people who follow the right pathway for entering competitions.

We’ve seen a lot of sites (e.g. Tiscali) start using CAPTCHA on their competition forms, whilst others have said they do monitor their entries.

Any comps we do run are in registered areas, users must use a form… and if a question is asked we randomise it.

But most of the time you can spot this activity from server logs and checking your entries. If you usually get 2000 entries over a whole competition and then get 20000 in a day, then you can conclude that something is amiss
Jason
Kelvin said on August 15th, 2008 at 4:30 pm

While it’s not ideal having these ‘fake’ entrants I spose there’s a chance you could use their details for some other kind of marketing? I would definately agree with the voiding their entry isf that’s easy to administer
Jason said on August 15th, 2008 at 4:41 pm

“I spose there’s a chance you could use their details for some other kind of marketing?” - possibly, except the emails are special accounts where the person doesn’t even need to check for wins as the auto-entry service does it for them.

So no visitors and no marketing data - you may as well go into the street and give your prizes to a passerby.
Kelvin said on August 15th, 2008 at 4:43 pm

“So no visitors and no marketing data - you may as well go into the street and give your prizes to a passerby.”

ahh in that case they’re even more of a pain than I’d realised, looks like filtering is the best option then
Are Your Competitions Getting Visited By Automated Entry Services | Steve Kinsey.Com said on August 15th, 2008 at 11:17 am

[...] read a blog posted yesterday from Jason Dale over at One Little Duck affiliate blog. The post was concerning online competitions and the fact that there are now online services that [...]