I love data, lots of data, but even on an amazing site like Squadhelp (SH) the data available to Creatives about their contest entries can be time-consuming to find. The data is there, sort of, but can appear quite siloed. I have posted before that I would really like a Creatives control panel where one could see at a glance which contests have been entered, what the status is (closed, pending, abandoned etc) any updates on time extensions and what the winning entry was. In an attempt to give myself the experience of an at-a-glance overview of my contest entries, I created a spreadsheet of all my contest entries from mid-January 2022 to mid-April 2023. So, a bit over a year to drill down into. I don’t enter a lot or all the time, so in this time period I am showing a total of 120 contests.
Of the 120 contests during this time period the end results were as follows:
CLOSED - 63 contests
ABANDONED - 52 contests
CANCELLED - 2 contests
PENDING - 3 contests
CLOSED contests, represented about 54% of the 120 total I was reviewing. I confess to being disappointed that this percentage wasn’t higher. In a few cases the winning entry was never made public and while I understand there may be business reasons for this, I’d still like to know sometime (as a comparison check against my entries). In this data review, my opinion of the winning entries is irrelevant as it’s what the Contest Holder (CH) thinks that matters. However, I did feel that some of the winning entries represented exceptional value for the CH. It didn’t seem to matter whether this was a high or low value contest. Interesting (to me) was that the winning entries I secretly hi-fived were the ones that almost immediately were up and running as business websites. With some of the other winning entries that had me wondering if we’d entered the same contest, some of those domain names never even got registered. Finally, three of the winning entries were domain names that were for sale on SH. One of those was purchased and is running as a business website. The other two winners appeared not to have been purchased in the end (and are still for sale on SH), although they still show as being the winning entry. I’m not sure what the status of those names is now? Can they be re-entered to new contests?
ABANDONED contests represented around 46% of the 120 reviewed. I am surprised at this percentage, but I’m at a loss to know what more SH can do to bring this percentage down. I reviewed each contest and mostly the CH seemed engaged with the creatives, often with multiple pages of messages. I also looked at every CH’s star rating (which I have always understood to be a measure of their engagement / rating within the contest). The bulk of the CHs in abandoned contests had 5 star ratings! The next biggest group were 4 star ratings. So it doesn’t seem as if the CH’s were in any way disinterested or unengaged in the contest.
CANCELLED contests, only two of those. One was a Non Guaranteed contest which I usually don’t enter, so that was my error. The other was due to a credit card chargeback, which I have not seen before on SH. This honestly seems a very low percentage to me, so SH must have some rigorous checks and balances to prevent this.
PENDING, although only three contests, this is an interesting statistic. One contest is from March 2023, so although lagging somewhat it is not out of line for some SH contests. The other two are a different matter. Both are higher value contests, which is possibly why they are being held to a different standard. One is originally from March 2022 (18 months ago) with 17 reported domain registrations. The other is originally from February 2022 (20 months ago) with 37 reported domain registrations. With no Creatives control panel where updates could be posted, I’ve no idea why these contests have been allowed to drag on like this. Surely it would be possible to post a message for the Creatives involved in these contests?
I hope some of you find this personal data drill-down interesting and I would love to see any other stats some of you might have compiled.