“Pro Competition Entrants” – A Promoter’s View

Cheats

“Pro Competition Entrants” – A Promoter’s View

Competitions are a funny business. On one hand there are many brands and promoters who run prize draws and giveaways for a multitude of reasons and on the other hand you have a bunch of folk who love entering competitions. In theory this should be a match made in heaven. But not every promoter loves a comper. Holiday site i-Escape for example state on their terms that compers may be disqualified if they’ve found the competition via a listing site. Marks Electrical on Instagram state on their posts that entrants “must have their own active personal Instagram account, competition accounts will be void”. On one hand we understand the caveats, but on the other they make no sense. For example what if you’re a comper who finds i-Escape via Google or Instagram? What determines a competition account? Who knows!? Anyway yesterday we received an email from a small business who recently ran a Christmas giveaway. We’re not naming them but will refer to them as “Promoter X”. However they’re not a big site, we don’t think that they’ve run many giveaways and if we’re reading the lines correctly are probably not going to do any more. To enter the entrant needed to visit the website and sign up for a newsletter. The prize was festive and was worth just £45. Our tracker suggests over 500 users marked it as entered. Despite this the promoter has complained to us as the prize draw was “flooded with entries by pro competition enterers and multiple entries from people who have no intention of buying anything or becoming customers”.

“Entrants Like These Add No Value”

We don’t like it when any promoter, big or small, refers to people who enter competitions as a hobby as “pro”. People who collect stamps aren’t professional stamp collectors, someone who bakes for fun isn’t a professional baker so someone who loves trying to win things is just doing a hobby. If you set up a giveaway, prize draw or competition on or offline then the chances are that someone who loves comping will enter. If that person comes via a listing site or post stuff they’d love to win on Instagram shouldn’t make one jot of difference. If they enter 1 prize draw a month or 100 a day it shouldn’t make a difference. But as exampled above it obviously does to some promoters. We replied to “Promoter X” and gave our views on “professional entrants”. We also checked other sites to see if they listed the competition and checked out any social media posts. Interestingly we did find that “Promoter X” had posted on their Facebook feed and pointed out that compers may well have found them that way too (we’ll come back to this shortly). They replied with “we acknowledge that your users may not be professional competition entrants in the strictest sense, their behaviour, such as submitting multiple entries from accounts like “mikecomps1907@” and “mikecomps1908@,” clearly demonstrates that their sole aim is to enter as many giveaways as possible without genuine interest in the products or brands running them”.

Fair Points?

As far as we know the email is just a suggestive example of what they’re seeing and not an actual email. “Promoter X” then explained “their approach goes against the spirit of these giveaways. From a small business perspective, entrants like these add no value – they rarely interact with our brand meaningfully, don’t share their wins and contribute to a noticeable increase in mass unsubscribes”. There’s a few things to unpack here. Firstly no one should be cheating and submitting multiple entries. If folks are doing this for a £45 festive item then it stands to reason they’ll be doing for everything else. People need to stop this! There’s an argument that organisers can flush out cheats by removing multiple entries. We always suggest that form based prize draws collect IP addresses and entry numbers reviewed frequently but not every business is geared up to do this. Frustratingly it’s the ones who don’t know what to do – or decide that it’s too much hassle to do – who turn around and tar all compers with the same brush. Of course cheats add no value to any business but not every comper is a cheat. Not all compers will go on to become paying customers but some will. In our experience genuine compers do still purchase items (maybe not immediately), are more than happy to share posts and are definitely happy to share wins. We’ve covered this in our Comping Guide for Promoters.

Back To Facebook

We don’t like getting the blame for every ill in the comping world so when the finger is pointed at us we do some digging. What we found was that “Promoter X” advertised their competition on Facebook. On one post they received 45 likes, 8 comments and 3 shares but on another 189 likes, 38 comments and 20 shares. Both posts stated that to enter you needed to “click below to sign up” and nothing about liking, sharing or tagging. Two of the shares were made a Freebies Group that boasts over 60,000 followers. Could it be possible that actually the problems experienced by “Promoter X” weren’t actually down to their competition being shared on Loquax? Could more compers have found them via their own social media posts? “Promoter X” replied that “we did observe that Loquax was a significant source of traffic once our giveaway was listed there. We’re not suggesting Loquax is solely responsible”, which is nice. However they did also mention that when they looked at social media profiles “many of these entrants share dozens of competition posts daily and have no intention of engaging with the businesses hosting these giveaways. This behavior significantly undermines the purpose of giveaways for small businesses like ours, which rely on these initiatives to attract and engage with potential customers”. This is where we’ve got confused because the prize draw was on the website and our traffic went to the website not Facebook or Instagram. So we searched again and discovered that “Promoter X” has run social media prize draws in the past. We found one from August 2020 (223 comments, 159 shares) and one in August 2023 (215 Likes). Interestingly the former also encouraged entrants to “sign up for our email newsletter” for a bonus entry.

More Meaningful Engagement

“Promoter X” suggested the following to us: “Perhaps there’s an opportunity for Loquax to encourage its users to support the small businesses hosting these giveaways? Encouraging your users to engage more meaningfully – whether by visiting websites, making purchases or sharing genuine feedback – would benefit everyone involved”. Now these are fair points but we already do this and have done this pretty much see day one. But we can’t make people buy things and we can’t stop people cheating. We can obviously make suggestions to our users and compers in general plus call out issues but beyond that it’s out of our control. The promoter doesn’t want to appear on Loquax in the future, which is fine, but what happens if they run future giveaways? Reading between the lines we’re not sure that they will. Which is a shame because obviously their experiences from running giveaways hasn’t been good. Importantly “Promoter X” did say “We’re not suggesting Loquax is solely responsible, but given your platform’s influence, this is why we reached out”. Evidently the promotions and resulting entries haven’t achieved the aims of the business but actually that is the responsibility of the business. The good news is that there are things they can do in the future so that competitions still “benefit all involved”.

Making Competitions Work For Promoters

Competitions or prize draws can be used in numerous ways – to build a social media following, develop a newsletter audience or encourage sales are just some examples. Again we’ve covered this in our Promoters Guide but it’s something that we probably need to update it because it doesn’t cover using competitions to generate actual sales. If “Promoter X” wanted a competition that encouraged sales then there are things that they could have done to do this. For example they could have done a purchase necessary giveaway as often used by Waterstones (e.g. anyone buying XYZ will go in a draw to win the £45 prize). They could have run this in the lead up to Christmas so as to encourage festive purchases too. This would have encouraged visits to the website and possible purchases. We’d have still included it on Loquax but the number of entries most likely would have been less. If that competition achieved no increase in sales then maybe the business would need to look at other options. Promoters can also limit interest in their promotions by asking winners to collect their prizes and/or limit the entry area to their locale. As for meaningful engagement and genuine feedback that can also be addressed by asking for order numbers or comparing entry details to order details (this is something Trustpilot does to a point). If you ask folks to simply like, tag and share on social media then you’re going to get likes, tags and shares. Better engagement and interaction can come from asking questions or encouraging users to find their favourite product on the website. Cheats are the scourge of this marketing sector and everyone should be working to eradicate cheating so competitions and prize draws are fair. However promoters can do more to make their giveaways work for them and that’s simply by running better giveaways.

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