Do All Your Competition Entrants Visit Your Site?
Posted under: 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!
I would have to agree with you on that one. I am a big fan of CAPTCHA.
[...] store Chelltune pointed out these useful articles if you are running a competition. The first includes some tips from the owner of competition site Loquax, and the second sets out UK law on [...]
[...] 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. [...]
I had one massive jump in a comp and found the traffic was coming from the moneysavingexpert.com site where someone had posted the answer to a question and where to email it.
I got loads of entries from people who probably never visited – but then again, I did get a load of visitors to the site form moneysavingexpert.com too.
So it’s kinda swings and roundabouts.
Randomising the answer is a good idea though to help stop what I experienced.
Well, I’ve just had 3000 of these entried in ONE day!
REALLY IRRITATING.
That’s alot of them to delete, and they all have the wrong answer anyway.