How many entries?

Twice in recent months I have given entry figures from various comps in Grape Vine and both times I have had a great deal of feedback from readers. We compers like to know what we are up against - do we really have a good chance of winning or are we just wasting our time? Well, you are NEVER wasting your time because however long the odds, there are only two GUARANTEED ways of not winning a competition.

1. Get your entry disqualified by giving an incorrect answer or breaking a rule
2. Don't enter.

If you avoid those two pitfalls, your entry has as much chance as any other, however many others there are. But the fewer entries there are, the bigger that chance is so a low entry competition could make you a winner!

Here are the facts and figures that appeared in the February Grape Vine

Bear in mind that before Internet comping became popular, an entry form draw would have expected to get between 5,000 and 15,000 entries depending on the product and the distribution of forms, and a tiebreaker comp between 2,000 and 5,000. And one Heinz comp, with 57 cars on offer, had over 250,000 entries.


These are the entry figures for some recent online comps, some of which were on the popular Advent Calendars in December, one on this very blog and others on the website of a well known product over the course of last year.

PRIZE                                            ENTRIES

Hamper                                          6,300
Hamper                                          2,200
Health assessment                         1,400
£50 comping pack (on the GV blog) 370
Bottle opener x 10                          1,000
London Zoo tickets                         2,200
Pantomime trip                              2,400
Hamper                                         10,800
Luxury break in Scotland                 3,300

A competition that ran for several weeks, with a weekly prize of a case of soft drinks, had between 100 and 300 entries every week. The monthly comp on the GV website gets between 300 and 500 entries, while some competitions on blogs get only a handful of entries – sometimes not even enough to give away all the prizes.
 
This  was followed up in April with
 
A competition on Facebook with a prize of a television had over 19,000 entries.


A comp for a box of luxury chocolates could be entered through a blog or on Twitter. There were 1,796 entries on the blog and 174 on Twitter.

A comp in the Filippo Berio email newsletter, to win a recipe book, had over 2,000 entries.

The Maldon Sea Salt comp listed in the Feb GV, with 10 prizes of places at the Rick Stein cookery school, had over 4,000 entries.

Now I have some more facts and figures for you:

A game with daily prizes which ran  for 3 weeks on Facebook had a total of 6,000 entries or around 300 a day.

The Busy Bee competition on Facebook with a prize of Thomas Cook vouchers had 6,000 entries.

The daily Battery Force competition gets around 500 entries, the weekly comp on the same site around 70 entries and the daily comp on their sister site Light Bulbs First gets around 250 entries.

A well known hi-fi manufacturer ran a competition on Facebook, with some of their goods as prizes. The competition was open Europe wide, ran for a week and only had 330 entries.

Last year's Cannock Gates draw for a £1,000 holiday voucher had over 10,000 entries.

A blog competition for a year's supply of shoes bucked the trend for low entry blog comps by getting 1,260 entries.


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