Does Adding Viral Share Increase the Number of Entrants?

Giveaways with the Viral Share action ended with more entrants than giveaways without it, and the fairest way to measure that is inside the same business. In the Gleam Giveaway Benchmarks 2026, Edition 2, 159 paid-plan businesses ran both kinds of giveaway in the same year. Their giveaways with the Viral Share Action drew a median 1,094 entrants against 621 without it, a per-business ratio of 1.41x, and 63.5 percent of businesses ended higher with the action.

Where the extra entrants came from

The same giveaways started from reach only 10 percent higher, counting widget views before any share-link click, while their total views were 49 percent higher. The gap between those two figures is the traffic the share links brought. Referred entrants are additional to the audience the giveaway already had, which is what a referral mechanism should show.

You can see the same split on your own campaign. The Viral Share report separates share-link clicks and successful referrers from the rest of your traffic. See Viral Share Reporting.

What the comparison does not prove

The giveaway that gets the action is usually the business's bigger effort, with eight actions against five and more promotion behind it, and that travels inside the 1.41x. Narrowing to businesses whose two giveaways started from similar reach gave 1.21x, on too few businesses to publish as a benchmark. Nothing here shows that switching the action on for an otherwise unchanged giveaway adds 41 percent. The middle half of businesses ran from 0.81x to 3.11x.