Thursday, September 9, 2010

Anatomy of a high ranking sweepstakes (and a low one)

Looking at two promotions on either end of the Win.ly Rating Engine scale gives good insight into the advantages that the automated ratings give.

First let's look at the Sobe "Heads or Tails" instant win, which is currently at the top of the rating list by a wide margin.  Actually one of the highest ratings in the history of the engine.  [The engine has been running since the summer of 2009]

What are the key factors?

First of all: number of prizes.  Wow!  Over 490,000 prizes worth just short of $2 million in total.  (And that's not even counting the BOGO coupons).

Second: duration.  Only three months.  That's over 16,000 prizes given away every day.

Third: traffic.  Although the site has moderately high traffic estimates, it isn't high enough to effectively diminish the odds.  So there are relatively few people competing each day for those 16,000 prizes.

That's a recipe for a really good chance to win prizes.

Now compare this to "Game Z" [name withheld for politeness] with one of the worst ratings on the list.

This is a sweepstakes for one prize.

It runs for nearly eight months.  Average prizes per day?  Less than .005 (that's "five one thousandths").

And it lives on a site that is getting HUMONGOUS amounts of traffic.

Rough estimate of traffic is about 20 times more than what we are seeing with Sobe Heads or Tails.

Simplifying quite a bit for a rough estimate, you have (approximately) one twentieth the number of people competing for 3.2 million times more prizes (on average per day).  So that's (shockingly) 64 million times better chance of winning a prize on Sobe Heads or Tails.

Yes, you read that right.  64 million times better chance of winning a prize.

This, my friends, is the value of Win.ly.  Are you wasting your time on "Game Z"?

No comments:

Post a Comment