UpViral Review + Case Study: Why Giving Away Free Stuff is Harder Than You Think

“114,585 leads in less than 30 days!”

“We collected over 100,000 new subscribers in our first month!”

“We gathered 20,000 leads in 14 days!”

These are the kinds of claims used to advertise viral giveaway or contest apps. When you read such statements, it’s easy to think that launching a viral contest might be all you need to boost your mailing list to the next level.

In true ActiveGrowth fashion, we decided to put this to the test and give you the full rundown of what we discovered. This is our review of UpViral, along with the exact behind-the-scenes of the contest we ran, using it.

Read on to see how it turned out for us and what we learned along the way...

Our original goal for this post was to investigate several contest and giveaway tools as a roundup review, but that turned out to be a bit impractical. We like to field test tools as much as possible and running 5+ giveaways in succession just wasn’t going to happen.

Instead, we opted to test one tool thoroughly and use the experience as a case study to learn more about the promotional medium of contest giveaways.

After doing some preliminary research the short list of contest app candidates turned into a coin flip between UpViral and Gleam.io. I used the following criteria to make my selection:

• A/B Split testing of opt-in forms
• API integration with email marketing platforms
• Social media sharing rewards
• Real Time Analytics
• Fraud Detection

In the end, I decided to run our contest case study on UpViral because it has an opt-in form A/B testing where Gleam.io does not.

In Shane’s previous attempt to run a giveaway, one of his conclusions was that A/B testing might have improved the results of his first contest experience so I gave a lot of weight to this feature to test it in our giveaway.

So with a $49 per month Pro subscription to UpViral, I went to work using the ActiveGrowth rapid implementation strategy to launch the contest in under a week.

There are a ton of moving parts to orchestrate when it comes to assembling an online giveaway.

Not only do you have to put together a valuable prize pack for your target audience, but you'll need to address each component of your giveaway software application and set up promotional streams to pump your contest as well.

Here’s how it went down for us using the UpViral platform...

Don’t waste your efforts running a contest that gives away prizes like iPhones, iPads or iPods.

Prizes that aren't tailor made for your target audience will only serve to leads that will never become customers.

Therefore, one of the basic rules to running a successful giveaway is creating a prize pack that’s only desirable to your target audience.

It’s also best to use prizes that are cheap and easy for you to give away, but valuable for your audience to win.

Two of the prizes I knew I could easily include in our ActiveGrowth giveaway that met this criteria were:

1. A membership to Thrive Themes (ActiveGrowth’s sister company)
2. A 60 minute coaching call with Shane (the founder of ActiveGrowth and Thrive Themes)

But feeling like we needed something extra to round the prize pack out and make it super valuable, I did some lightning fast outreach to get a giveaway sponsor onboard.

Knowing Shane has long recommended WPX Hosting for high performance WordPress Hosting and having recently recommended WPX Hosting myself after some rigorous testing, I reached out to WPX Hosting to see if they’d be interested in sponsoring our contest.

The quick-hit combo of online business coaching with Shane, a Thrive Themes Membership and blazing fast WordPress hosting made a potent “Online Business Prize Pack”. Therefore, partnering with WPX Hosting for the contest just felt like a no-brainer and a prize combo I thought the ActiveGrowth target reader would be keen to win.

Here’s a copy of the outreach email text I sent to Terry at WPX Hosting:

After a few back and forth communications with WPX Hosting, they were excited about the giveaway and onboard to help us as a sponsor.

Getting outside partnerships isn’t always smooth sailing though. We did do additional outreach to sweeten our prize pack with some other internet marketing tools, but received either no response or negative replies from those companies.

Be prepared to hustle when building these partnerships and always focus on what sponsors will get from helping your contest with their products!

But with our awesome prize pack now set, I lost no time in getting everything else set up for launch day. My 1-week countdown was ticking fast...

There are a few different ways you can host your contest on UpViral. You can either host everything on UpViral’s platform and servers sending all your traffic to the links they provide or you can embed UpViral’s sign up and share widgets on your own website to have more control over the contest and traffic.

I wanted contest traffic to see a custom built giveaway landing page designed using the Thrive Architect content builder so I went with using UpViral’s embedded opt-in form widget option.

Navigating through UpViral’s contest setup dashboard was fairly straightforward, but surprisingly limited in its customization and design features.

Like I stated above, you can either select one of UpViral’s hosted-for-you opt-in form designs or choose one of their widget templates to embed on your own site. Unfortunately, there aren’t many templates to choose from in either category.

Even though you can customize the UpViral form templates, the editing options are basic and didn’t really expand outside of modifying form colors and text. Editing the forms proved to be glitchy too, especially when it came to adding videos or images so I just stuck with the basic design and used Thrive Architect to place Shane’s contest explainer video where I wanted it.

The UpViral setup process continues by creating referral and social share widgets shown directly after contest sign up. The share widget template selection and editing process was just as limiting in design customization as the opt-in forms.

You can choose to include social media share buttons for Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, Pinterest and Whatsapp. The share widget also provides unique referral links for your contest entrants by default.

UpViral does allow you to A/B test opt-in form designs and social share widgets by creating multiple forms for each. However, the design options are so basic, copy felt like the only thing worth split testing.

With that in mind, I created the 2 opt-in form variations and 2 social share widget variations shown in the sections above that all used the same visual design. UpViral then A/B tested each set of embedded widgets against each other on our giveaway landing page and post signup share page.

As you can see from the data in the screenshot below, 2 weeks in to testing, UpViral’s A/B Testing did identify a higher converting value proposition for us ("Win 1-on-1 coaching with Shane" lost to "Help yourself by helping a friend").

UpViral Lead Capture and Share Widget split test data on Day 14 of the contest. The form winners were selected based on the data shown here and used until the end of the contest (Day 20).

But overall the small split testing bump didn't really seem worth it when weighed against all the other negative factors we found with UpViral platform that we’ll discuss shortly.

The next step in the UpViral contest setup was configuring our “Social Appearance”. This is the pre-set copy and images you can create for your contest entrants to share automatically through their Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and Email accounts in exchange for bonus entries.

You can keep this section as basic or make it as fancy as you want, but a little effort here can help make sharing that much easier and attractive for people who just signed up for your contest.

To help incentivize social sharing of your contest even more, UpViral allows you to program how many bonus entries people can earn when they: 

1. Sign up,
2. Share your contest on various social media platforms or
3. Get their friends to sign up for your contest through a unique referral link they are given.

This point determination is completely up to you, but we decided to award contest entries in the following way:

1 point for contest entry, 1 point for sharing on social media, and 5 points for each referral sign up through a contest entrant’s unique referral link.

Each point counted as an extra chance to be drawn at random as the first winner. Additionally, if someone referred the randomly selected winner, they would win the second prize pack too. The idea here was to incentivize sharing in every way possible to help get the contest to go viral.

We tried to innovate with this contest, to make it more enticing for people to enter and share. In addition to the usual incentives for sharing our contest, we wanted to give entrants a second avenue to winning.

How?

By awarding two grand prizes: one for a randomly selected winner and one for the person who referred the randomly selected winner.

I thought this idea would even add some psychological leverage as entrants would feel as if they could help themselves by helping their friends win when signing up through their unique referral link.

Unfortunately, as you’ll see soon, this strategy didn’t seem to boost referrals as much as I hoped.

UpViral makes running either most-points-win contests and random winner sweepstakes super easy.

In a most-points-win UpViral campaign, your winners will be selected based on who earned the most social sharing and referral points over the course of the campaign. Pretty simple.

Alternatively, you can run a contest asking entrants to submit a photo of something and you’ll choose the best one to win. This would be a merit-based.

However, if you’re running a random drawing sweepstakes like we were, UpViral can randomly select winners on a “weighted draw” basis. Essentially, every point earned is an extra chance to be drawn at random from the total number of entries.

To set either type of contest up in UpViral, you just select the “Sweepstakes” option, enter the number of winners you want to award, select either “Most Points Wins” or “Weighted Draw”.

Additionally, if you want to carry out the referral winner experiment I did in this case study explained above, you must first select a random “Weighted Draw” winner and then manually cross check every entrant with referral signups to see if they referred that winner to award the second prize to them.

It took a lot of time for me to do this at the end of the contest and it didn’t have the viral boost I was hoping for so all the extra effort and complexity of the experiment may not have been worth it in the end.

Once your contest is set up, UpViral allows you to program auto-notification emails for:

1. New registrants
2. Referral link sign-ups
3. Winners
4. Possible Fraud Detection
5. Double opt-in confirmations

For our contest, I only set up the time to set up new registrant and referral link sign-up emails and called it a day. Looking back, it might have been a good idea to also set up the fraud detection notification email as well...more on that below.​​​​​

One of UpViral’s strong points is how many API connections it has with email autoresponders...over 50!

We were easily able to hook up our own email marketing service and apply a tag specific to our contest to help segment brand new registrants from current ActiveGrowth readers.

However, there is a significant danger in connecting your email marketing service to UpViral as we discovered towards the end of our contest that we'll discuss momentarily. 

Finally, the UpViral advanced settings allows you to add your contest rules and integrate them as links into the contest opt-in forms.

If you want to collect even more data, you can also set up several tracking and retargeting codes for your contest. In order to launch the contest before my 1 week deadline, I didn’t take the time to set them up.

With your contest configured, UpViral spits some HTML code out for you to integrate within your landing page.

I did this via Thrive Architect’s “Custom HTML” element to get the UpViral signup and share widgets to load on the custom designed Halloween Giveaway landing pages.

The final landing page design with integrated widgets looked like the following:

Screenshot of the original, long copy landing page used to capture leads for the giveaway.

Because we prepared and launched our contest in under a week, promotion proved to be the weakest link of our giveaway.​​​​​

On October 11th, our contest went live and I started promotion by emailing the ActiveGrowth mailing list.

And although we were aiming to build our ActiveCampign audience with new subscribers, existing subscribers can help get the word out by sharing the contest to other target leads which was why I shared the contest with our existing subscribers.

Here’s a screenshot of that email Shane sent:

Although this initial email proved to bring in the most leads and referral traffic to the contest, it became clear after a day that we were experiencing lower-than-normal open rates. This was probably due to the email subject line being too “promotional” in nature and was either ignored by readers or filtered into the Gmail’s “Promotions” folder.

Screenshot of the Open Rate and CTR percentages from Announcement Email #1. This email was sent to the entire ActiveGrowth subscriber list.

After a steady decline in signups, I launched a Thrive Leads Sticky Ribbon across the ActiveGrowth website on Day 6 of the contest. It contained a simple message and button directing visitors to the contest signup page.

Screenshot of the Thrive Leads Sticky Ribbon used on the ActiveGrowth blog to send our traffic to the giveaway landing page.

From Day 6 to the end of the contest (Day 20), the sticky ribbon measured 1933 views (as measured through Thrive Leads) and experienced 1544 unique clicks (as measured through the Pretty Links plugin).

Looking back, not launching the sticky ribbon from the start of the contest was a mistake as it had an 80% click-through rate for ActiveGrowth traffic!

Due to the fact that I launched the giveaway so quickly, I didn’t launch our first Facebook ads launched until Day 7 of the contest. These ads seemed to give the contest new life as visitors and signups started to pick up once again.

With multiple sets of ad copy and images prepared, I used AdEspresso to split test different ad sets for the contest.

As you can see from the screenshots below, I tested long copy ads against short copy ads to see if that made any difference in Click-Through Rates (CTR) and Cost-Per-Click (CPC):

However, even though the ads increased visitors and contest signups again, the Facebook ad spend averaged around $120 per day. The cost per click during this time worked out to $3.15.

It’s hard to be exact with the data I had at my disposal, but the conservative estimate for how much new contest entrants cost via our first set of giveaway Facebook ads worked out to be around $10 per lead.

Needless to say, that’s pretty expensive just to get someone to sign up for a free giveaway so the Facebook ads weren’t very successful.

On Day 8 of the contest, I asked Shane to send out another, less promotional sounding email to those ActiveGrowth list subscribers who hadn’t opened the original announcement email yet:

This second email brought some additional giveaway subscribers into the mix, but also had low open and click-through rates:

Screenshot of the Open Rate and CTR percentages from Announcement Email #2. This email was only sent to those ActiveGrowth subscribers who did not open the first giveaway announcement email.

With the combination of our Thrive Sticky Ribbon, the start of our first Facebook ad campaign and our 2nd announcement email, Day 8 surged to become the second highest day of visitors and signups.

On Day 9, visitors and signups to the giveaway started to fall again so we decided to test out posting on related Facebook Groups and SubReddits.

This ended up being extremely difficult to pull off because, no matter how personal and non-spammy you make your posts, Group Admins tend to delete them or ban you from groups for promoting something.

Depending on your niche, free Facebook Group style promotion may be over. In order to succeed with it, you’ll need to have a connection or control over such groups to keep your posts from being deleted.

Before my posts were deleted from the Facebook groups I posted in, I did have some brief success direct messaging around 50 people who responded positively to it. This leads me to believe that free social media promotion (when presented in a very personal way) is still a great way to get visitors to your contest, you’ll just need to do the work ahead of time to become a strong member of those communities before you start posting.

With 1 week left to go in the contest and signup engagement falling fast, we decided to try one more experiment to see if we could give the contest a final boost.

Looking at UpViral’s visitor versus leads data, it appeared that we were getting poor conversion rates. Because of that, on Day 14 we simplified the contest landing page down to the bare minimum and launched a new set of Facebook ads.

Instead of using a custom designed, long form contest landing page like we had been running, I switched to a super simple, above the fold design that looked like this:

Screenshot of the simplified, short copy landing page used in the last week of the contest.

I then tweaked the Facebook ads to fit the new landing page copy to see if that would lead to better engagement with the contest.

Screenshot of an ad variation used in our Facebook ad campaign #2.

In the end, it didn’t really make much difference. The best ad variation (shown above) maintained a very similar CTR (0.403%) and CPC ($2.68) compared to the previous Facebook ads and landing page conversions didn't change much.

We saw a small bump in visitors and leads on the 24th when the new Facebook ads launched, but it quickly fell back to the old daily baseline.

Also, rather unfortunately, the cost per Facebook lead in this last week of the contest jumped up to around $19 per lead. It turns out giving away free prizes can be much more difficult and expensive than you think!

One of UpViral’s very important features is its “Fraud Detection” system. I have to say that it really saved our bacon in final days of the contest.

As you might expect, certain cheeky individuals may try to game your contests to boost their chances of winning. Until the last 2 days contest, this wasn’t a problem as only 5 fraudulent entries had been flagged.

And to be honest, it seemed like those fraudulent entries were actually just people signing up with a second email not knowing it was against the contest rules.

However, on Day 19, something crazy happened. The number of leads spiked from around 400 to over 8,500!

As you can imagine, my mind started racing to illusions of grandeur where the viral sharing had finally saved the day in the final hours of the giveaway and turned my case study into a massive success.

However, when I went to double check UpViral’s Fraud Detection feature, it turned out that a single IP address had generated 8,172 fake signups!

Screenshot of UpViral's Fraud Detection results at the end of our contest (with names, photos and emails whited-out). UpViral allows you to inspect the suspicious referrals, blacklist them, and delete their entries from the contest.

Now while this sounds super annoying because it completely messed up my UpViral campaign statistics and burst my big bubble of false hope, it also came with some other negative consequences. Because I had connected UpViral via API connection to our email marketing service, all of those fake names and email addresses had been automatically added to our ActiveGrowth mailing list.

What I didn’t realize before the contest was that a single cheater could max out our current subscription plan and shut down important email marketing automations crucial to our business.

In the end, we were able to blacklist the cheaters from the contest and quickly delete the fake emails from our list by filtering for the bad IP address, but be aware of this pitfall when setting up your next giveaway as it can lead to costly impacts in your day-to-day business!

So here’s the final numbers for the ActiveGrowth Halloween Prize Pack Giveaway:

Screenshot of UpViral's contest statistics. Only data from Day 1 to Day 18 of the contest are shown here due to the 8100+ fraudulent entries added on Day 19 of the contest.

Unfortunately, the UpViral data graphed above does not include the last 2 days of the contest due to the fake visitor statistics generated by the big contest cheater so they were left out. The three peaks in leads and traffic on the graph correspond to the initial contest launch, and two Facebook ad campaign starts.

With the data corrected to not include the fake referral leads and traffic, the overall campaign metrics ended with the results shown below:

And here’s the UpViral final statistics from contest:

Although UpViral has several cool features discussed above to help run your contest, I was disappointed in it overall.

For example, the embedded UpViral signup and share widgets were incredibly slow to load. Load times for the widgets were usually in the 5+ second range so it’s a good bet that bounce rates from our landing page were higher than normal because of this.

As stated at the beginning of the article, UpViral does offer their own hosted opt-in form and share pages that load faster than the widgets do so use this option if you decide to pull the trigger on UpViral for your next contest.

Also, UpViral’s opt-in form templates and customization options were both buggy and limited. Although UpViral can A/B test these forms for you, I was really only able to test value propositions via the copy. Basically, UpViral’s A/B testing feature disappointed me.

In UpViral’s marketing, they lead you to believe that after your contest is set up, the viral sharing nature of the software will automatically work to bring you many new leads for free.

All I can say is don’t count on it. For me, the biggest lesson learned from this contest case study was that promotion streams matter more than the software platform. Take time before you launch your contest to do quality outreach and you’ll have a much better shot at creating a viral giveaway.

When it comes to running online giveaways for your business, I think they have lots of potential to boost your list and grow your target audience, but the most important success factors aren’t tied to the contest software you use.

It’s likely the promotion and partnerships you create before your launch are the most important. In this regard, rapid implementation of your contest may not be the best move if you really want your contest to go viral.

Spend the time and effort doing outreach ahead of time with related influencers, Facebook Group admins and businesses that would benefit from the exposure your contest provides.

As you can see from this case study, relying heavily on Facebook ads for promotion is expensive and not always a reliable strategy to get your contest to go viral. However, internet marketing is a tough market so Facebook ads may work much better in less competitive niches.  

Also, your online business niche probably plays a big role in the shareability of your contest. As much as I love geeking out on optimized hosting and WordPress plugins, it’s just not a very sexy niche most people want to share on social media with their friends and family.

If you are in a more buzz worthy industry, giveaways may prove much easier to go viral as your target audience may identify with the prizes better and be more eager to share it among their friends.

Have you ever run a giveaway or contest for your online business? If so, how did it turn out for you?

Please share your insights and lessons learned in the comments below!

P.S. Congratulations to our two ActiveGrowth Halloween Prize Pack winners, Ash & Curtis!

They won a 60 minute coaching call with Shane, 1 year of WPX Hosting and a 1 year Membership to Thrive Themes for entering our case study contest!