How Many Entries Should a Referral Be Worth?
The typical paid Gleam giveaway awards 5 entries for each referral, and the number of entries you award has a small relationship with how many referrals you get. Across 3,400 paid giveaways with the Viral Share action in the Gleam Giveaway Benchmarks 2026, Edition 2, giveaways awarding 2 or more entries per referral had a median referral share of 8.4 percent against 8.0 percent for a single entry, 0.4 points apart.
What organizers set
A quarter of giveaways award a single entry per referral, four in ten award 10 or more, and one in ten awards 50 or more. Even the top band, 25 entries or more, read 11.0 percent, three points above a single entry. Inside size bands the direction was not stable: no gap among giveaways of 100 to 499 entrants, four points in favor of 2 or more among giveaways of 500 to 2,499. The award is worth setting above 1, and there is no measured reason to set it above 10.
You set the value in the Entries field of the Viral Share Action, where the share buttons and lock settings also live.
What moved referrals more
Position did. On widgets of nine or more actions, a share action placed in the first four slots came with a 10.4 percent referral share against 6.4 percent lower down. Promotion breadth moved it more still. If you are deciding where to spend attention, those two settings come before the award.
\n- Winners are drawn from entries, not from people\n- A 50-entry award gives one active referrer the odds of fifty single entrants\n- Set the award to match how much weight you want referrers to carry in the draw
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