By Award Compass
You know how many entries came in last year. You almost certainly know the revenue this generated too.
What you likely don’t know is how many people visited your entry page and left without starting their submission.
In our last article, we said the longest walk in awards is the one from your homepage to a completed, well-matched entry.
In the coming weeks, we’ll take that walk in order. We start at the beginning, with the moment an entrant arrives.
It is also the moment you can see the least.
A prospective entrant who lands on your site, scans a list of categories and closes the tab doesn’t appear in any report.
Nobody owns that loss, because it never looks like one.
This is the part of the journey the Entry Navigator was built for.
To capture anyone who comes to your award show’s platform to explore the possibility of entering, before they leave.
What the industry actually measures
One metric the industry does name is entry conversion rate: how many people who start an entry and go on to finish it.
AwardStage lists it among five measures of how an awards programme is really performing.
It is a good number to have. But it starts counting the moment someone begins, so it can’t see the person who never did.
Ask your team what share of your homepage visitors start an entry. At most shows, nobody can say.
Typically, the visit happens on your website and the entry happens on a separate entry platform. Joining the two takes work, and even then you can count a visit but you can’t reach the visitor.
The Entry Navigator removes that friction.
What the entrant is walking into
Form benchmarks from Zuko, compiled by Feathery, attribute 27% of online form abandonment to length.
The same compilation says a form with usability problems risks being abandoned by 67% of the people who meet it.
Those figures come from forms across the web, not from awards.
An award entry asks for a good deal more than most: a case study, results, evidence, and a decision about which category to enter, with no way of knowing whether the choice is right.
Entry volume is a UX problem before it’s a marketing problem.
So it’s worth walking your own site the way a first-time entrant would. Open a tab and look for five potential pitfalls:
The categories are a wall of PDF. An entrant who has to download a document to find out what they can enter may well not bother.
There’s no guidance at the threshold. The entrant has to know what they want to enter before they’ve been shown anything.
Pricing is hidden. If the only way to find out what an entry costs is to send an email, some entrants won’t send it.
The portal is buried. If it takes two clicks to get from the homepage to the entry portal, that is two places to lose someone who was ready to enter.
Registration comes first. Asking for an account before showing any value asks for trust you haven’t earned yet.
You will probably find more than one.
Measuring the walk
Then try to put a number on it. Build a four-step funnel: visits to your entry page, clicks through to the portal, started entries and submitted entries.
Your website analytics should cover the first two. Your awards software should cover the last two. The hard part is joining them up.
The gap between the first step and the third is the walk. Track it week by week through the entry window and you will see when intent arrives and when it leaves. What you won’t see is who any of those people were.
Categories won’t fix it on their own
Evessio analysed more than 2,000 award programmes and found that the number of categories is the strongest lever on total entries, ahead of entry window length, price, timing and discounts.
That is good news for any show with a broad category structure.
But a long list of titles only helps the entrants who can find their way through it.
A large, well-organised category set is an asset. An unintelligible one is a barrier wearing the same clothes.
Shortening the walk
Here is how the Entry Navigator shortens it.
An entrant arrives with their work. Instead of a list of category titles and a blank form, the Entry Navigator reads what they’ve brought, matches it to the right categories and turns it into a started entry.
That is the difference between an entrant who closes the tab and one who starts.
It also captures the entrant’s email address along the way. A visitor you could only ever count as a number becomes someone you can follow up with.
Award Compass is already working with Festival of Media Global across four of its shows.
To date, the Entry Navigator has supported 132 entries, worth more than £66,000 in revenue, for the client and captured 75+ new entrant email addresses.
See the walk on your own site: book a 20-minute walkthrough at awardcompass.com
Sources: Zuko form-abandonment benchmarks, compiled by Feathery. AwardStage, Five metrics that reveal how your awards are really performing. Evessio, What Drives Entry Volume? Insights Report. Festival of Media Global figures: Award Compass client results.