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I 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 will enter competitions for you and keep entering, without you visiting the site. Now this of course is a very bad situation for the site running the competition for several reasons:
- You’re not getting any real traffic for your competition and have no chance of capturing subscribers or selling affiliate products.
- Your competitions sponsors (if any) won’t be happy if they find out.
- It’s not fair on those dedicated readers who visit your site regularly and enter the competitions correctly.
After reading the post I decided to check my latest competition at DigitalLard and was indeed shocked to find that one of the competitions had some very suspicious entries. It wasn’t really hard to detect them, the email addresses were all from the same few domain names and they all had something like j.doe12346@somedomain.com.
I quickly jumped upon this and changed the way the competitions worked, now people need to be registered and logged in to the site before they can even see the entry form, I also put a small disclaimer on the page explaining why I took the action, stressing that it was in the interest of fairness for all legitimate entries to take this action. Finally I added a message to the terms and conditions to say that any automated entries would be removed from the competition.
This I hope should be enough to deter these automated entry systems, and even though I am sure I will get less entries to the competition I will at least know that they are genuine site visitors and the contest will be much fairer to all those legitimate entries. Also as a side effect I will now get more registered users on my site and get all the advantages of a larger user base.
Anyone that runs a competition should take some steps to protect your competition from these automated entry systems. Some people will not have a registration system for their site, but you should try and do at least some of the following options.
- Use a CAPTCHA system on the form to block automated entries.
- Place a rule on the competition that any automated entries will be removed
- Block the competition from all but registered site members
- Watch your entries carefully when choosing winners to ensure they are legitimate
My thanks to One Little Duck blog, for encouraging me to check my own competitions.
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Otooo said,
I agree with what u are saying, but still, a competition is a competition - it is free to enter and anyone should be able to win.
Otooos last blog post..My Daily Advertising Schedule: Challenge For Success
Steve Kinsey said,
But if someone is getting dozens of entries a day with different variations of they’re emal address that is hardly fair on all the others entering the competition legitimately.
Jason Dale said,
Otooo - so let’s say you offer up a £1000 prize for a competition to (1) get visitors to your site (2) have that visitor interact with a sponsor and (3) join your newsletter.
Would you be happy if the person who then won that £500 had (1) never ever visited your website (2) hadn’t even seen your sponsor and (3) had joined your newsletter with an email account that isn’t used - other than to see if some prizes have been awarded?
Yes a competition is a competition - but it’s also a marketing tool and a promoter should make sure they’re getting value for that promotion.
The entrant should do the basics to qualify their entry - i.e. go and visit the website, enter the competition themselves and follow the mechanic laid out by the promoter.
If you allow people to pay a company to do entries for them, so that those people never visit anyones website or interact with your sponsors/advertisers or even join your newsletter, you may as well scrap any competitions you have and give any prize you were offering to a passerby in the street because in the end it has the same marketing value.
Jason Dales last blog post..Do Lead Programs Suffer From Automated Affiliates?
Russ Greeno said,
Interesting point - having been a habitual competition entrant (when I had time) on sites like Jason’s Loquax and The Prizefinder I was always looking at ways to speed up entries, though I would never have paid for something to do it for me.
Danielle said,
Nice site!!! I really enjoyed the post and I will be back for sure!!!
Danielle (YBA)
Danielles last blog post..Concept Cars of the Future
Promotional Products said,
Good information, I’ve never looked at competitions that way.
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