If you host a competition on your website you may find that hundreds of emails or online entries appear but they all have the same format and just have a person’s name, phone number and address.
If there were any questions to answer in the competition they wont be in the submissions.
Q. What is going on?
It’s likely your competition has come to the attention of one or more online automated competition entry services.
These services charge people a monthly fee to enter them automatically into lots of competitions.
Services such as
- Win24
- WeWin4U
- Prizewise
- Prize500
- PrizeDrawCentre
For some competitions maybe that isn’t a problem, but for others it can a big annoyance and even overwhelm the number of genuine entries by individuals.
One of the companies listed above guarantees each person at least 1,000 competition entries per year.
Automated competition entries are of little benefit to a website running a competition as there isn’t anyone looking at the website – just software.
How To Avoid Competition Spam
- Don’t offer an email route to enter the competition – only through a form on the page
- Don’t have a competition where only name and address are required to enter – include at least one question to be answered and preferably one or more questions that are open rather than having multiple choice answers
- Use a form with a CAPTCHA to stop the automated entries
- Consider making users login to enter your competitions, but you might lose some people that way
- Make it a rule that automated/bulk entries will be disqualified and do disqualify any that get through
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