Skip to main content
There’s no point running a competition if you don’t get any entries. But what happens if you’re getting some entries, but nowhere near what you’d consider enough entries to be able to achieve your competition goal?
Enter your new best friends when it comes to getting more entries for your competition: traffic insights and conversion analytics.
When clients hire us to create their competitions they’re essentially hiring our traffic generation and conversion optimisation prowess to ensure the best possible outcome for their competition and the best possible return on investment for their marketing dollars. If you’re not ready to work with us just yet, this blog post is the next best thing to having our competition pros monitor and tweak your competition round the clock.
Here’s how you get more entries for your competition.
The leaky bucket analogy.
I’m going to rely on a well-worn analogy to help explain the importance of – and difference between – traffic and conversion in this post: a leaky bucket.
Imagine your competition is a bucket and the water in your bucket represents your competition entrants. The aim of the competition game is to keep as much water in your bucket as possible as you transport it from A to B.
Now, if you have holes in that bucket, you’re going to find yourself with significantly less water at your destination than you set out with. Think of this like your competition conversion.
Dominik Fuchs from Pixabay illustrates the leaky bucket analogy with their bucket picture.
Continuing the bucket analogy, the amount of water we put in our bucket in the first place can be compared to your competition traffic – the more water we put in our bucket at point A, the more we should end up with when we arrive at point B.
The trick to getting more entries for your competition or contest, is ensuring we plug as many holes as possible in our leaky bucket and fill it as full as possible with water, so that when we arrive at the end of our competition, we have plenty of entries and achieve our competition goal.
The next few steps will walk you through exactly how to diagnose whether your competition is full of holes and you’re losing entrants at a conversion level, or whether it’s simply a case of not filling your competition bucket with enough potential entrants in the first place.
Step 1 – work out your competition conversion rate.
The first step to getting more entries for your competition, is to assess the holes in your competition bucket, so we can fix them.
For this, we need to know your competition conversion rate – of all the people that saw your competition, how many of them actually entered (and how many of them slipped through the holes)?
To calculate your competition conversion rate you’ll need:
- Access to your Facebook/Instagram/other social channel insights
- Access to your Google Analytics if you’re using a competition landing page
- Access to your email marketing stats
- Any other relevant analytics, insights or stats you can get your hands on
You will also need the following formula:
Competition conversion = actual entries ÷ potential entrants
Check your analytics to find your reach or views if you’re collecting entries on social, or check your visitors or traffic stats if you’re collecting entries via a landing page. This is the number of people who have seen your competition and could potentially have entered.
Once you have these stats, check your total number of entries. Again, if you’re running a social media competition, this will be the number of likes, follows or comments, for example. For a landing page this will usually be emails entered.
Divide your actual entries by the total number of potential entrants. Multiply this figure by 100 to get a percentage.
So if you’ve had 403 comment entries on your competition post on Facebook and your post reach is 4032 unique people, 403 ÷ 4032 = 0.99 (or 9.9%) conversion.
If you’ve had 3,478 entrants enter their email to win, out of a total 6,710 visitors to your competition landing page, 3,478 ÷ 6,710 = 0.518 (or 51.8%) conversion.
Now we know the state of your competition bucket, your competition conversion rate, we can fix the gaps and get more entries for your competition or giveaway.
Step 2 – improve your competition conversion rate.
A high-converting competition is one that turns as many people as possible from ‘just looking’ to ‘just entered’ and nailing a high conversion rate is the first step to getting more entries for your competition or contest.
On average, we’ll see a 70%+ conversion rate from visitor to entrant for our competitions. That means that for every 10 people who visit the competitions we create for our clients, at least 7 of those will enter the contest or giveaway.
NOTE: OrigamiGlobe rarely ever runs social media competitions purely with the goal of getting likes, follows and comments, as these types of competitions have a very poor return on investment. Normally, we run enter your email to win or purchase to win competitions for our clients, which have a much higher chance of making our clients more money than they spend on the competition (or positive ROI). The 70% conversion rate is therefore for competitions with landing pages or purchase to win entry mechanisms. Social media conversion will be much, much lower.
If you’ve got a competition conversion rate of 70%+, maybe you’d like to come work with us? Just kidding, congratulations, you’re halfway there to getting more entries for your competition and the good news is, you can be pretty confident the reason for your lack of entries is due to a lack of traffic, which we’ll cover next.
If your competition conversion rate is below 50%, however, you’ve got some work to do, as you’re losing really warm and valuable potential entrants. We need to plug the holes in your leaky bucket before we try and put more water in.
HOW TO UP YOUR CONVERSION RATE
Here are our top tips to improving your competition conversion rate and getting more entries. Note that these tips apply to both social media competitions and contests run via a landing page.
- Check you’re not having technical difficulties preventing people from submitting their entry. Submit a test entry and fix any bugs.
- Check your analytics to see who your post is reaching or who is landing on your competition page and ensure they’re the right people you’re trying to attract.
- Is your prize attractive enough? If people are seeing your post or visiting your landing page and deciding the prize isn’t worth the effort – can you convince them otherwise?
- Revisit your competition copy – make sure you’ve explained clearly and concisely exactly what they have to do to enter. Don’t overcomplicate it.
- Simplify your entry method or process by asking only for the most essential information – every step is a hurdle that trips people up and stops them from entering.
- Change up your creative. If the picture you’ve used isn’t scroll-stopping enough, or they can’t find your entry form, change the picture or move the form to the top – then benchmark your conversion rate and see if the redesign improves it.
- Troubleshoot why people may not be entering – is your page too slow to load? Does your Facebook entry post make it clear you’re running a competition? Find your competition’s holes and plug them.
If you’ve tried all of these and your conversion rate is still really low, book in a free chat with us and we’ll get to the bottom of it together.
Enjoying this post?
There’s a lot more where that came from! Subscribe to our monthly newsletter for more practical tips, tricks and how tos.
Step 3 – send more traffic to your competition.
Now we’ve plugged the holes in your bucket and you’re converting at least half of all those who see your competition into actual entries, it’s time to check if your fixes will hold water and your competition will get more entries.
When you patch up holes in a leaky bucket, you don’t go straight to the tap and turn the water on full pelt to see if your fixes worked. You turn the water on gradually, letting a small trickle test your handy work and if it looks like you’ve done a good job, you up the flow little by little until your bucket is full.
Start by trickling traffic to your competition, just like this cat from Kazuky Akayashi on Unsplash.
The same is true for a competition. We’ve fixed the most pressing problem by ensuring that if people do see the competition, they have the best possible chance of entering – helping you get more entries for your contest or giveaway.
The next step is to send more traffic to your competition now you know they will convert into entries. Traffic refers to the number of people seeing your competition or visiting your entry page/post and is heavily reliant on the amount of promotion you do.
Start with the channels you know are already working – that means taking a peek at the posts that drove the most engagement or entries for your competition and posting more just like them, or checking analytics for your top competition referral sources and channels to your landing page and increasing your activity on those channels.
Hopefully, you should maintain your improved conversion rate, but if you find that it drops again, go back to step two and fix your conversion before you send more traffic to your competition. Blindly sending heaps of traffic to your competition without optimising for conversion first will not result in more competition entries.
If your conversion rate holds, hooray! Good work. Now it’s time to ramp up the traffic heading to your competition – with your new found improved conversion, you can be 100% certain that driving more traffic to your competition post or landing page will result in more entries for your contest or giveaway.
Check out our posts on promoting your competition and running Facebook ads on a budget for quick start ideas on sending more traffic to your competition.
To truly maximise the number of entries you’ll receive for your competition and keep entries flowing steadily throughout your giveaway; you need to revisit your competition conversion rates and check your traffic regularly. You may find conversion dips again as your creative gets stale or a certain source of traffic dries up, prompting you to seek traffic elsewhere. Keeping an eye on your competition traffic and conversion stats is like keeping your fingers on the pulse of your competition and making sure it stays alive and kicking, getting plenty of entries for your competition and ensuring you hit your competition goal.
Confused by conversion or finding traffic tricky? Don’t worry, it’s what we do best and we happen to love what we do. Book in a free strategy session with our giveaway gurus, or get in touch with us via our contact page. We’d love to help you get more entries for your competition.
