Before embarking on prize promotion we do suggest that you familiarise yourself with The CAP Code for Competitions and The CAP Code for Prize Draws. These are there to help you and your entrants! However even the best planned promotion can run into problems. The majority of these problems can be avoided by taking appropriate steps in advance of your promotion, others can be dealt with by tailoring your giveaway and having a better understanding of the fact that people like to enter competitions and help each other win prizes.
Compers love the chance to win competitions, but some promoters don't like compers. Even some pay to enter sites aren't keen. There are numerous reasons for this! Some promoters want their prizes to go to a specific audience, perhaps they want to reward loyalty, or they feel that people who like competitions dilute their marketing activity and add little value perhaps due to lack of interacton or purchasing. Some brands and sites even go as far to actively discourage compers and some request that they're not included on sites like Loquax. We actively encourage our users to stop and think about their comping activity because Loquax is as much for promoters as it is for compers. However no matter what we say some compers will still enter for anything and everything online. But there are things you can consider when running a competition.
Ostracising compers from your competition is not always the best approach. You might not like that people enjoy trying to win things as a hobby but they can still end up as customers, people willing to share your brand name across social media or long term users. If ypu shut the door on them then that will potentially reflect on you. Compers do talk, they share experiences and they are more than happy to discuss your brand - good or bad.
We hate cheats as much as anyone and will always support promoters who ban/block those who are up to no good. Unfortunately people do cheat and will find imaginative ways to try and take advantage. Multiple phone numbers, numerous social media accounts, sharing receipts, stealing photos, having several email accounts, using scripts to automatically enter draws without visiting your site, paying companies to enter draws - we've seen it all! If you run any kind of prize draw you need to be on the look out for those trying to take advantage. Look for patterns on email addresses and IP addresses. Is someone spamming your social media comments? Check who's tagging and who they've tagged. Reverse search photos if you're doing a photo competition. There are ways to not let the cheats win - you just need to be on top of them. If you do catch people cheating then let us know.
A few years ago voting competitions hit the headlines as people discovered how easy they could cheat them. Sites like GetOnlineVotes.com appeared so that entrants could quickly game the systems to win prizes. This site has now closed as voting competitions are no longer that prevalent. The problem with voting contests is that the person with the most friends wins or a cheat wins. Rarely does the best entry win when it comes down to voting by the public. Voting competitions are rarely fair and our advice to promoters is avoid them if at all possible! However if run properly voting competitions can be useful viral tools and there are apps and services which help monitor voting activity. If you do choose to run a voting promotion then do watch for cheating and take swift action if it occurs. Include a judged element for the biggest prize and award it to the best entry. Make the vote canvassing element a secondary part of your promotion.
If you use an online entry form then you can easily track where your entrants come from and collect data such as IP address. If you ask visitors to enter your promotion via email then you can't do this and open yourself up to attract cheats and spammers. Basically we advise promoters to not resort to asking for entries via email. At the bare minimum - if you're doing something web based - get a form on the site and use it to collect relevant data plus the entrants IP address. This could be the difference between letting cheats prosper and running a fair giveaway to genuine visitors to your site.
Automated Entry Services were a big problem several years ago and in 2012 we blogged several times about the problem of Automated Entry Services. We provided useful information for promoters to look out for including emails and IP addresses. As far as we know only WeWin4U are active in this space. Watch out for entries stemming from them as those entries are not visiting your site! Social media as a platform for competitions has definitely played a role in curtailing these services which is excellent news. That said it still pays to be vigilant if you're running a website based promo. Are you getting 100s of entries from similar IP addresses, strange entry patterns or something just doesn't seem right in terms of entries to traffic? If you are then you may want to disqualify those entries!
Facebook, X and Instagram have helped making and running giveaways so much quicker and easier. However they do also bring with them a few issues. Initially entrants with multiple accounts were the only problem but things have escalated in recent years. Fake pages have been created to claim prizes when promoters have posted a winner's name and asked them to get in touch. This can be avoided by not asking winners to claim their prize. A more serious problem, especially on Facebook, are cloned pages. These are set-up to look like a promoter's page and entrants are then contacted via Messenger saying they're a winner. Believing they've won from a genuine brand entrants then send details - including in some cases bank details - to what is actually a scam account.
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