Gleam Frequently Asked Questions

Welcome to the Gleam FAQ, here we aim to answer many of the burning questions you might have about the platform. If there's something that isn't covered or we've missed then we also have a public chatroom for customers (just click the Support icon in the left sidebar) that you can come into between 9am - 5pm AEST Monday -> Friday, or if we're not available you can submit a support ticket and we'll get back to you ASAP.

General FAQ

This section will answer some general questions about Gleam, further down you can also find the FAQ for competitions.

What Is Gleam?

Gleam is a growth marketing platform, we help you grow your business by running engaging promotions for your customers.

Gleam was launched in October 2013, here some stats about our business:

• To date we have driven over 850+ Million actions across 350k+ campaigns
• On average we drive 1.4 actions for every impression from of our campaigns
• We're completely bootstrapped and never taken any outside funding
• Over 10,000+ brands use the platform every month
• The platform is self service with no fluff, use it however you want it
• We don't lock you into big contracts ☺

Our Apps

Gleam is made up of a number of different apps that you can build campaigns on:

• Capture: Create opt-in forms that get triggers by user behaviour, then send the subscriber straight to 20+ supported email providers.
• Competitions: Beautiful combinations with an almost unlimited number of ways to craft how you want people to enter.
• Gallery: Build social media galleries that can be fed UGC from competitions, rewards, hashtags or other sources like Facebook posts.
• Rewards: Let users unlock a reward for completing some predefined actions. An example here might be a coupon code for joining your newsletter or a game key for joining your group on Steam.

What Are The Business Benefits?

Gleam is incredibly easy to use whether you're a small business or a large corporate, you can craft your campaigns to align directly with the objectives you might have.

Here's a few examples:

• Your organic reach on Facebook is dropping so you want to drive more users onto other social networks such as Twitter or Instagram
• You want to build an exit intent popup to show special offers to customers.
• You are running a flash sale on a particular product range & want to drive awareness by giving away gift vouchers.
• You have been tasked with growing your newsletter subscribers by 100% in 1 month.
• You want to allow your users to unlock a 10% discount to your store by following you on 2 or more social networks.
• You're launching a new product range & you want to drive awareness by running a competition with a select number of high profile bloggers.
• You have an E-commerce store and you want to popup a special offer to customers that are about to leave your site.
• You want to partner with other brands to giveaway each others products and share audiences.

Do You Have Any Case Studies?

We currently have 11 case studies and 29+ Positive Shopify reviews. We also often tweet about customer success, so following us on Twitter is a great way to see that.

Do You Support Other Languages?

The entire Gleam application is written in English, we do however have widget translations for a number of languages:

• Arabic
• Chinese - Simplified and Traditional
• Czech
• Danish
• Dutch
• English
• Finnish
• French
• German
• Greek
• Hebrew
• Indonesian
• Italian
• Japanese
• Norwegian
• Persian
• Polish
• Portuguese - Including Brazilian
• Romanian
• Russian
• Spanish
• Swedish
• Turkish
• Vietnamese

Freeform action types are not translated, this means that if you can control the text yourself on an action it will always be in English unless you add the text you want.

If you require a language that currently isn't supported we have a number of options to include it in the app.

Which Social Networks Do You Integrate With?

You can see a list on our integrations page. Then you can see all of the action types we support in the left menu ☺

Which Email Providers Do You Integrate With?

We support over 35+ different email providers which you can see on our integrations page.

What If My Email Provider Isn't Supported?

Unfortunately it's not possible to support every provider. We keep an active list of the most requested integrations and will prioritise those that our customers are asking for.

On higher plans we can provide access to our Webhooks, this would allow you to take data directlly from Gleam and build your own integration with an unsupported email provider.

We also offer the option of paying for the development work required to integrate your email provider. This will bump the integration to the top of the queue.

What Are Verified Actions / Entries?

Where possible Gleam always attempts to track whather or not a user has completed the action that is required.

This means that you end up getting much more qualified data as part of your campaigns & don't have hundreds of entries that haven't completed the action you asked them to.

There are a few networks that we currently can't automatically verify actions: LinkedIn, YouTube and Snapchat.

What Are Custom Actions?

Gleam has a huge amount of pre-built actions that are integrated with various API's or social networks. However you may find you want to ask users to do something that we don't fully support, for example "Write a Review on Trip Advisor."

Custom actions allow you to build these non-standard actions and choose various ways for you to verify that a user has completed them.

Get more information and learn how to setup custom actions.

Example below (with Trip Advisor setup):

Custom Actions Example

Do You Integrate With Wordpress?

Yes, there's a Gleam Wordpress plugin that allows you to easily add competitions to your blog using the shortcode below:

[gleam url="https://gleam.io/iR0GQ/gleam-demo-competition"]Your Competition Name[/gleam]

The URL in the shortcode must be the URL of your Gleam hosted landing page.

Gleam Stops Working In Wordpress When I Save A Post

If you add our widget to Wordpress in HTML mode, then switch to visual mode it will strip out vital parts of the code & prevent it from working.

In order to prevent this we recommend installing the Preserved HTML Editor Markup plugin.

If you are simply previewing a post on Wordpress, it's recommended that you save it first. Otherwise the widget may only display as a text link.

Does Gleam Work With Wordpress.com?

Unfortunately not. Wordpress.com does not allow you to add any Javascript inside posts, therefore you would be unable to embed the Gleam widget.

As an alternative many users will create a button or a banner then link to the Gleam hosted landing page from the post, the advantage of this is that this page is fully optimised for mobile users.

Will Gleam Slow my Site Down?

Gleam's overlay & widget loads asynchronously which means no matter how long our script takes to load, it will never slow your page down. We serve our widgets through a high speed (Content Delivery Network), which gives us low latency across the entire world & we also use caching to ensure the experience of your entrants is as fast as possible.

Is Gleam Optimised For Mobile Devices?

Yes, we do a number of things to ensure the Gleam experience is optimised across mobile.

Embedded Widget

Making an embedded widget work perfectly on mobile devices is extremely difficult. You have two options when embedding your competition. You can choose to let mobile users see the widget embedded on the page as normal.

The minimum width that the widget will be responsive to in 320px.

Or you can choose to show a button that takes a user our Gleam mobile optimised landing page.

You can disable the button by deselecting the option during setup, this adds a no-button class to the embed code:

<a class="e-widget no-button" href="https://gleam.io/iR0GQ/gleam-demo-competition" rel="nofollow">Gleam Demo Competition</a>
<script type="text/javascript" src="https://js.gleam.io/e.js" async="true"></script>

But The Widget Sticks Out Of The Screen?

This can happen if your responsive page has margins on either side of the widget.

For example, the widget is designed to fit perfectly into a 320px wide screen, but if you add 10px margin on either side, the widget can't be 300px to accommodate.

Therefore you end up having part of the widget getting cut off due to the margins.

Mobile Landing Pages

Our default Gleam hosted landing pages are fully optimised for mobile devices, this means that they will fill the width of the screen on mobile mobiles & tablets.

Mobile on Facebook

You can read more about how we do smart Facebook Tab detection in this blog post.

How do I Change The Width of The Widget?

The widget will automatically adjust depending on the size of the container you embed it in.

Normal Width: 540px
Minimum Width: 400px

If you put the widget in a container that is smaller than 400px wide then we automatically turn it into a button which takes the user to the designated landing page:

You can disable the button from appearing completely by unticking the Take users to a mobile optimised landing page option during setup or adding no-button on the embed class.

How Do I Add My Own Branding?

On all free accounts we include Gleam branding on our landing pages & emails:

In order to remove the default Gleam branding you must upgrade to a Pro account. This will also allow you to style your landing pages & emails with your own branding & logos.

If you upgrade to a Business account you will then have the ability to remove any Gleam branding from the footer of the widget.

Here's an example:

Win 1 of 5 Lorna Jane Gift Vouchers thanks to Choosi Insurance

Can I Change The Look & Feel of The Widget?

The business plan offers the ability to add Custom CSS to the Gleam widgets. You can apply the custom widget styles in your Site Settings & they will cascade down to all your campaigns.

Otherwise you also have the ability to apply styles at a campaign level.

If I Rename a Campaign Will it Still Work?

If you rename a campaign after you have already installed or embedded it will continue to work.

This is because even though the link to the campaign changes we mostly use the key in the URL to identify it.

How do I Delete a Site?

You can only delete empty sites, which means you will need to delete any live campaigns first. Once you have done this, you will see a Delete button on the Site dropdown in the left sidebar menu. We do this to prevent users from accidentally deleting their sites.

How do I Delete a Campaign?

If you have an active campaign, you will need to bulk delete all the Actions from that campaign before you can delete it. Once you have done this you will see a Delete button appear at the top of the Campaign. You can only delete it from the Preview tab, we do this to prevent users from accidentally deleting their campaigns.

Do You Offer a Whitelabel Solution?

Yes we do, for more information you can see our agency plans.

Competition FAQ

Below are common questions about running competitions, if there's something here that isn't mentioned you should also check out how to create a competition & also look at the instructions for the various action types on the left of this page.

What Does Mandatory Mean?

If you make an action type mandatory then it means that must be completed before the rest are unlocked.

You can see an example below:

Can I Change The Mandatory Text?

You have the ability to change the mandatory text on the business or agency plan. Just submit a support ticket with what you would like.

Can I Host My Competition On Facebook

At heart Gleam is designed to help you run competitions or rewards in as many places as possible. We have a native integration with Facebook, you can simply choose to publish any competition or reward on your Facebook page in a few sections.

How Should I Share My Competition On Facebook?

Facebook Tabs are not supported on mobile devices, this means if you share the direct link to the app Gleam creates then those users will see this:

To avoid this Gleam has a solution called Smart Links. This link gets generated once you successfully install a competition to Facebook:

You should be sharing this link inside any Facebook posts you make to maximize the amount of users that can enter your competition.

Where Can I Embed Competitons

It's our aim to make the integration of Gleam as smooth as possible no matter where you want to run it.

HTML Widget: We have widget that allows you to embed your competition into any page that supports HTML. This could be a blog post, static page or wherever else you can think of. Right now we do not support the ability to embed competitions within Facebook, however this functionality is coming. If you are a Shopify user you can automatically embed Gleam inside a page during install (provided you have added the Gleam Shopify App).

Javascript Overlay (Business Plan): When you create a competition you also have the option to style your activation button (you can see ours at the bottom of all pages). Users can click this then enter the competition from any page you include the javascript snippet on. You can also automatically trigger this overlay by using #gleam as the link.

The beauty of this flexibility means that you can create your own competition landing pages then trigger Gleam on a button, or however you want.

Facebook: You have the option to embed automatically in Facebook during installation.

What Data Do I Have Access To On The Free Plan?

On the free plan you only get access to contact information of winners picked via the Winners tab. This data will be obscured elsewhere in the app, including if you try to collect email addresses via a custom action.

Will Upgrading Unlock Existing Data?

Yes, upgrading to any paid plan will unlock data on your existing campaigns plus and older campaigns.

Can I Export My Data?

You have the option to export individual actions for a competition using the export button at the top right of the actions tab.

You also have the ability to export your user information using the export button at the top right of the Users tab in the sidebar.

How do I Add a Link in my Competitions?

Most entry methods accept normal HTML, which means you can add a link like this:

<a href="http://youlinkhere.com">Link Text</a>

How do I Add Buttons in my Competitions?

Our WYSIWYG editor has a Button builder that you can use to craft a range of clickable buttons.

What Happens If I Remove an Entry Type or Action After a Contest is Live?

If that entry method has had no actions then nothing will happen it will just be replaced with the new one or removed.

However, if that entry method has had 100 completions already, then actions will continue to count & you will see "Deleted entry method" in your reporting.

Can I Pause An Existing Contest?

Yes, to do this you will need to change the start date to a date later than today. This will maintain all the existing entries & prevent people from entering during the pause period.

Can I Change The Dates On A Contest?

Yes, simply edit and change the dates. You can extend or shorten a contest at your leisure.

Can I End A Contest Early?

Yes, simply change the end date to whenever you want to contest to end & save.

Can I Hide The Total Entries?

You sure can, there's a checkbox on the Pro Plan when setting up a competition to Hide the total entry count.

Can I Hide The Login Buttons?

Absolutely, there's two ways to do this. You can remove all the possible login options during setup:

Or you can add the following CSS to the custom CSS box (Business users only):

.small-bar { display: none }

How Do I Sync With My Mail Provider?

You can use a Subscribe Action to sync with any of our support email providers.

How Do I Sync All Entrants With My Mail Provider?

Just make your Subscribe Action mandatory :)

What Do The Entry Confirmation Emails Look Like?

The example below shows what the entry confirmation emails look like on the free plan. With higher plans you can add your own branding.

I Didn't Get The Confirmation Email When Testing?

We automatically invalidate test entries and invalidated entries don't receive a confirmation email.

You'll need to go to the Actions tab of the campaign, look for your entry and mark it as Valid to trigger the confirmation email.

How Often Do You Send The Entry Confirmation Emails?

They currently rollup all the entries from the last 5 minutes, this means we don't send the user multiple emails per entry (which is pretty spammy).

Confirmation emails can take anywhere up to 10 minutes to be received.

Can I Turn Off The Entry Confirmation Emails?

Yes, there's an option during campaign setup to do this.

Do You Offer Custom Emails?

Yes, we offer the ability to send Custom Emails on the Business plan.

Can I Run Facebook Timeline Contests With Gleam?

Gleam is compatible with Facebook contests, however there's a few additional steps you need to take if you want to run timeline contests.

How Can I Promote My Competitions?

We offer a number of ways to help you get more visibility on your competitions:

Competition Alerts: Users that enter your competitions have the ability to opt-in for competition notifications. Business plan users have the option to email those instantly when you publish a new contest via the promote tab. The more competitions you run the bigger this list will grow.

Embedding: We make it super simple to embed & integrate your competition on any sites you control. Depending on the prizes we typically see anywhere from 1%-5% of website visitors entering a competition (which can increase dramatically if you enable viral sharing).

Social Sharing: You can incentivize users with additional entries for sharing your competition on social networks. If the prize resonates with that users followers then you're more likely to see viral uplift.

Promotion is often the most overlooked aspect of running a successful campaign. We've written an in-depth guide on how to promote your contests.

What Level of Support Do You Provide?

Gleam is a self service platform, as such we provide technical support for issues and queries for all customers depending on your Plan.

Free: 24 Hour Email Support
Pro: 12 Hour Email Support + Live Chat (9AM - 5PM AEDT, Monday -> Friday)
Business: Priority Email Support + Live Chat + Scheduled Phone Support* (9AM - 5PM AEDT, Monday -> Friday)

• Scheduled phone support available for yearly Business customers.

Do You Provide Strategic Advice or Help?

If you'd like us to get more involved with your campaign or business (outside general support queries or issues) we offer strategic services which we charge for.

We charge $1,000 for a block of 4 hours (valid for 12 months) that can be used for:

• Training
• On-boarding
• Plannning
• Best Practice
• Growth Hacking Tips/Tricks
• Campaign Reviews
• Campaign Setup
• Custom CSS Help
• Promotional Guidance
• Parntership Guidance

Disabled Promotions

You may come across certain promotions that say Promotion Disabled.

We work hard to ensure that the campaigns run on the Gleam platform are legitimate, but from time to time we may disable a promotion and ask the campaign owner for verification that they will indeed fulfill the prize.

Some of the reasons that campaigns may become disabled (but not limited to):

• We have reason to believe that the prize is not being fufilled
• We have evidence that fake winners are being chosen
• Gleam is not being used to select winners properly

We use a number of methods to police this activity, and we also ask that if you think a campaign is suspicious then to get in touch.

Billing FAQ

Have some questions about our monthly plans or billing? Get some answers below :)

Do You Offer a Free Trial Period?

Our Free Plan allows users to run a fully functional campaign and see what is possible using Gleam.

Additional features can be unlocked by upgrading to the Pro or Business Plan.

While we do not offer a trial period for the Pro and Business plans, if you feel that the plan does not meet your needs please contact us and we will offer a refund on the most recent billing month (provided you have no active campaigns).  

Am I Locked into a Plan?

No, not at all. We give you complete freedom to upgrade & downgrade your plans as you want. Locking into a yearly plan will give you a discounted rate but we don't force that - we want you to love using Gleam before you choose to lock in longer.

I Only Want to Upgrade For 1 Month, What do I do?

If you upgrade you will be charged recurring until you downgrade to the free plan again. If you only want to use Gleam for 1 month, then you should upgrade then downgrade straight away. Once that month is complete then you plan will revert back to free.

How Do I Cancel My Account

Just go to the Plans tab in the sidebar then switch back to Free and click Save.

I Upgraded During a Special Offer, What Happens After?

If you upgraded during a special offer then you will continue to recieve that offer until it expires. So for example if you upgraded on a cheaper yearly plan the plan will renew at the rate that exists on the renewal date (which may be more or less).

What's Your Refund Policy?

Gleam is a subscription based service, which means when you upgrade to a specific plan you will continue to be charged until your change your plan back to Free.

Our current policy is that we can provide a refund on your latest charge provided you have no active campaigns running or provided your previous campaigns ended before your renewal date. We will not refund previous months charges, only the most recent, and we will not refund if you have had an active contest within the current paid period.

This means that if you were on a $39 plan running a contest & you forgot to downgrade we can provide you a refund. Likewise if you pay to upgrade then realise that Gleam isn't for you we can refund your account provided you have no active campaigns running.

We do not currently provide any refunds for credits or yearly subscriptions, unless you cancel within the first month without running a live campaign.

Do You Accept Paypal or Bitcoin?

We only accept credit card or debit card payments currently.

Help my Charge Was Declined?

Gleam uses Stripe to process credit card charges, on occassions you bank may decline the charge for a number of reasons.

Card Was Declined

Often banks won't give us a reason as to why the card was declined, it may be possible that the charge triggered a declined or suspicious response from the bank. Some US and European banks also dislike that we are an Australian company, and occassionally flag legitimate charges as fraudulent.

What to do if this happens

You will need to call the bank to find out why they declined the charge, once they whitelist it you'll be able to retry and the payment will go through.

Why are there $0.70 charges on my card?

This is how our payment processor authorises the account can be charged. The payment will be reversed.

Insufficient Funds

If you get this type of decline then it simply means there's not enough funds in your account to facilitate the charge. You'll need to make enough funds available to proceed.

What Will Appear on my Credit Card Statement?

You will see our domain

GLEAM.IO

on your credit card statements.

Contestant FAQ

Login To Your Existing Account

Gleam doesn't use passwords for contestant accounts, instead we require that you login with a previously connected social account.

If you cannot get past this prompt then you are attempting to login with a social account that is not connected with the current email that you are trying to use.

You can email hello@gleam.io from the linked email address if you are still having issues (for example your linked account has been deleted and is preventing you from logging in completely).

Login Has Expired

Gleam uses connections with various social networks to automate and improve the experience for both entrants and owners of the campaign.

This message may appear in the follow circumstances:

• You are attempting to use a social account that is not connected to the current Gleam account
• You have revoked Gleam permissions from a specific social network
• Your access token on a specific social network has expired
• You may have deleted a specific social network account that was previously connected to Gleam

In order to fix this issue you will first need to navigate to the "Edit" screen next to your name:

On this screen you will see which Social Accounts are connected. Firstly, ensure that the account you are using matches the one that is connected on Gleam. If not, then you will need to switch accounts or remove the connection from Gleam and reconnect the new one.

The same goes for deleted accounts, you will need to remove the old account from the Gleam edit screen and then link your new one next time you complete an action that uses that provider.

Email / Account Already in Use

You may be trying to change your email address inside Gleam but getting an error that the account is already in use.

This essentially means that you have already previously created or entered a Gleam campaign using the email address you want to change to. Since that account exists, you cannot update the email address on your current account to one that is already in use elsewhere.

You will need to log back in with the old account, then use the Edit screen to remove any associated social accounts from the old address, then login with the new address and reconnect them.

Entering Date of Birth

Some competitions require you to enter your date of birth to verify your age. The organiser has the ability to set this up in UK or USA format.

Make sure you are entering your Birthday using the requested format, which may vary based on location. Day first DD/MM/YYYY and month first MM/DD/YYYY are sometimes confused (depending on your location).

How Can I Turn Off The Post Entry Emails?

There's an unsubscribe link at the bottom of all emailed that you get sent, just click on that :)