A few months back, I was involved in running a competition for a website.
We’d put a good deal of work into sourcing some fantastic prizes for the readers of the website, and then we’d spent time (and time is money) designing the competition on the page, laying out images, setting up the email account to handle competition entries, writing terms and conditions.
As you’ll know if you’ve been involved in this sort of thing, there are lots of things to organise when you put a competition on your site or blog, in terms of the wording used for each sponsor, getting the links just right to optimise SEO, that sort of thing.
The payback for all of this investment is, of course, that you attract visitors to your site. If you’re smart you’ll have tweaked your site so that people visiting your site to take part in the competition will see your key messages. You may devise a competition question that requires them to read some text provided by the sponsor, or which means they have to look at a certain page on your website.
But as anyone who’s been on the Internet for more than five minutes knows, there are people who scour the Internet looking for competitions. Post anything on Twitter including the word “competition” or “free” and within minutes the link will find itself on a competition site somewhere, and hundreds of visitors descend on your site to enter the competition.
That’s less than ideal – many of the people entering the competition aren’t your target audience, they’re just looking for something to win which they’ll sell on eBay after all. But it’s the risk you take when you post a competition online, and when it happens, I shrug my shoulders and get on with my day.
But I’m less sanguine when competition sites post the entire text of the competition entry AND the answer to the competition, with a direct link to the page on your site where they can enter.
What this means is visitors often bypass your home page (with any carefully crafted messages or special offers you’ve designed), don’t need to read any of the text that you or the sponsor have created, and simply enter the competition and immediately leave.
Hmm.
I must confess, when this happens to me, I’ve changed the question. I always write into the terms and conditions that I reserve the right to do this in the event that the answer is posted on the internet, and then I filter all the wrong answers straight into the trash folder. Experience has taught me that 99% of people won’t bother to even read the question if they think they know the answer.
I’ve also let competition sites know that posting the entire text of a competition with the answer is a breach of my copyright (in the same way as reposting any of my content would be). Most sites are pretty good about taking down posts – and Moneysavingexpert will also disable links to your site in their forums when you alert them to this sort of problem. And I always use IP logging to ensure people can only enter a competition once (unless they own more than one computer, obviously!)
I’ve had conversations with other people who have argued that this approach is unnecessarily mean. But my view is that blogs posting someone else’s competition with the answer are facilitating cheating. And why should I let someone cheat?
What do you reckon? Should you worry about the quality of entrants to a competition, or is it just about the numbers?
