We've launched the Gleam MCP server, so you can manage your campaigns by asking Claude or Codex.
Create a token in your site's Settings, add it to your AI app, and it can read every Competition, Reward and Capture on that site. Because it reads the same data the editor does, you can ask questions across all your campaigns at once ("which ended campaigns still have no winner?") and act on the answer in the same chat.
You can ask it to:
List your campaigns and open any one in full (dates, prizes, actions, settings and counts)
Change a campaign's name, dates, prizes, images and settings
Draw random winners, assign prizes, allow repeat winners, or draw only from entries made between two dates
Copy a prize image from a product page into Gleam and use it on a campaign
It works with Claude Code, Codex CLI and the Claude app. It can't create or delete campaigns, export entries or edit the actions in a campaign yet.
The Gleam MCP server is available on the Hobby Plan & above.
We've launched Playbooks: a free set of interactive tools that turn "how do I run a better giveaway?" into a specific answer in under a minute. No account needed 🎉
Every giveaway comes down to small decisions: which product to use, how to weight your entries, why entries have stalled, whether you're ready to launch. Each Playbook asks you a few quick questions and hands back a plan, a fix or a checklist built for exactly where you're at, grounded in what actually works across thousands of Gleam campaigns. Here's the full set:
Gleam has four products (Competitions, Rewards, Captures and Galleries), and picking the wrong one is the quiet reason a lot of campaigns underperform. If you're not sure whether your goal is to grow an audience, reward loyal customers, capture leads or showcase content, it's easy to default to the wrong tool and then fight it the whole way through.
This Playbook asks you two quick questions about what you're trying to achieve and points you straight to the product built for it. No feature-comparison tables, no second-guessing, just a clear starting point so you set up the right campaign the first time.
A giveaway can look busy and still not grow anything. Entries trickle in, sharing stays flat, and you're left guessing which part is actually holding you back: the prize, the entry actions, the timing or the way it's being promoted.
Score Your Giveaway grades your setup and shows you exactly what's affecting your results, then gives you the specific fixes that move the needle. You leave with a clear score and a short list of changes to make, not a vague instruction to "make it more viral."
Giveaway rules vary a lot by country and platform (for example they even vary by State in the USA), and getting them wrong is more than a technicality. It can get your promotion pulled, your account flagged, or your winners disqualified. Most people either copy someone else's terms or skip them entirely and hope for the best.
This guide checks exactly what your terms and conditions need to include for where you're running: eligibility, prize disclosure, platform requirements and the clauses you can't leave out. It turns an intimidating legal grey area into a clear checklist, so you launch compliant and protected.
Most giveaways end and everyone moves straight on to the next thing, which is exactly how the same mistakes get repeated. The lessons are sitting right there in your results, but without a framework it's hard to pull them out and act on them.
The Post-Mortem walks you through a structured debrief of a finished campaign (what worked, what didn't, and why) and turns it into concrete changes for next time. Every giveaway becomes a step up instead of a one-off you forget about.
The best giveaways are planned, not thrown together the week before. Miss the lead time you need for prizes, promotion and approvals and you end up launching flat, or scrambling at the last minute and cutting corners.
This Playbook builds you a dated 12-month plan with planning and launch deadlines already built in around the moments that matter to your audience. You get a realistic schedule you can work backwards from, so nothing important gets rushed or skipped.
There's nothing more stressful than a live campaign that isn't converting. The clock is running, the numbers are flat, and panic-tweaking settings usually makes things worse rather than better.
Answer a few questions about your live giveaway and this Playbook diagnoses the most likely cause (prize fit, entry friction, traffic or timing) and hands you a specific action plan to turn it around while it's still running. Think of it as triage for a campaign that's underperforming.
Entry actions are where a giveaway either grows or stalls. Offer too few and there's no real reason for people to share; add too many, or weight them wrong, and entrants bounce before they finish.
This Playbook shows you which actions to add for your specific goal and exactly how to weight them, so you reward the behaviour that actually grows your audience (follows, referrals, email sign-ups) without overwhelming people. You end up with a balanced setup that drives real growth, not just empty clicks.
Running a giveaway by hand (collecting entries in a spreadsheet, verifying actions, drawing a winner yourself) feels free right up until you count the hours and the risk of getting it wrong. It's the hidden cost most people never add up.
This Playbook lays out exactly what changes when you switch to Gleam: the time you get back, the fraud and manual errors you avoid, and the entry methods you simply can't run on your own. It's an honest side-by-side so you can see where the tool earns its place.
Paid ads and giveaways both buy you leads, but at very different real costs, and most people never actually put the two side by side. It's easy to keep pouring budget into ads simply because it's the default.
This calculator works out your true cost per lead for each, factoring in prize, spend and expected results, so you can see which channel gets you more for your budget. You make the call with real numbers instead of gut feel.
The moment right before launch is where small oversights turn into live problems: a broken link, a missing rule, an entry method that quietly doesn't fire. By the time you notice, entrants have already hit it.
This Launch Playbook runs a 10-point pre-launch check across the things that most often go wrong and gives you a fix list for anything you're missing. You hit publish knowing your giveaway is set up to succeed, not just hoping it is.
Whether you're planning your first giveaway or rescuing one that's already live, there's a Playbook for exactly where you are right now.
Rewards - Create Reward entries for a user and add it to an existing Rewards campaign.
Captures - Create a new Lead and add it to an existing Captures campaign.
With our new POST API, you can effortlessly gamify user actions in your app, automating entries without manual spreadsheets or complex workflows. Create new custom actions outside of Gleam's widgets and seamlessly integrate Gleam with your apps, websites, and systems. Add entries in real-time as users interact with your platform, ensuring a seamless experience that keeps both your app and Gleam in sync.
The Gleam API is available on Premium plans.
Want to start integrating but don't know where to start? Here are some ideas we have for our customers:
E-Commerce: Automatically create Competition or Reward entries when customers make a purchase.
Loyalty Programs: Automatically award Competition entries for customer actions like referrals or reviews.
Mobile Apps: Trigger Reward entries based on in-app actions or achievements.
Events: Create Capture entries automatically when attendees complete certain actions, like RSVPing or checking in.
We have updated our integration to support the latest version of Google Analytics. To keep tracking your campaigns, you'll need to enable the new Google Analytics 4 Integration in your Site Settings → Integrations.
You'll also need to set up custom dimensions to access Gleam events in your GA4 account.
GA4 Integration is available on the Business plans for Competitions, Rewards, or Captures.
You can now require entrants to verify their email before logging into your Gleam widget. This will help maintain high quality leads for your campaigns.
To enable this feature, go to any Competitions or Rewards campaign and check Verify user email before actions in the User Details tab. Entrants will receive a 4-digit code from Gleam to enter into your widget.
Email Verification is available on the Business plans for Competitions or Rewards.
As part of our initiative to improve Gleam Capture's campaign reporting, we are gradually introducing some enhancements to the Captures dashboard, and reconstructing Capture visitor & lead data to contain more useful data points to help you make better marketing decisions on your website.
We have also created brand new documentation for Capture Data.
For Click Captures, the Leads tab will now be replaced by the Actions tab, which contains a list of all visitors who interacted with the Click Capture campaign.
Since Click Captures do not have named users, the Leads tab did not report any user data. Although this was the expected behaviour, our Capture customers couldn't access any other information relating to the clicks.
The new Actions tab will allow you to see where & when the click was from. You can also filter the Actions report with a custom date range.
Furthermore, under the Events tab in Reporting, you'll be able to see the number of visitors who dismissed your Capture, or if they clicked on 'No, Thanks' at the second step of a Two-Step Capture.
Note that there are no changes to data & reporting for Email Captures & Coupon Captures.
To learn more about the different variations of Reporting for all Capture types, check out our new documentation for Capture Data.
We have a brand new library of powerful Capture templates available for all Gleam users to browse and try.
With our in-depth library of customisable Capture templates you can create a wide range of opt-in forms, coupon popups, website banners, announcements, sale countdowns and so much more. Whatever your goals are, our Capture templates can help you deliver targeted messages anywhere on your website, generate leads, and drive instant action.
If you don't have a Capture plan yet, you can even test out all our templates for free before committing to a subscription.
Check them out today by navigating to Captures on your Gleam dashboard, and don't forget to leave us feedback & suggestions so we can continue to build more templates for you!
We've come a long way since the BETA days for Gleam Capture!
Existing base templates are going to be deprecated on the 31st of August, 2021.
You can no longer create new Captures with the old templates, but we have replaced them with new & improved versions, so you can provide a more pleasant experience to website visitors.
The new templates have:
Email & user icons in form fields
Improved alignment between form elements
Softer edges around Capture form borders
New base templates are immediately available when you create a new Capture, based on your existing plan.
To assist in migrating existing Captures to the new & improved version, we've made some changes to the Captures dashboard to help you make adjustments. Users with affected Captures have been contacted via email.
You can now allow users to immediately access your Competitions, Captures, and Rewards campaigns on their mobile devices by scanning a QR Code and being directed to your campaign's landing page.
This is a fantastic way to get users to enter your campaigns from physical locations such as retail stores, cafes, restaurants and events. You can even use QR Codes to promote your campaign through flyers, posters and other physical marketing materials.
Today we've rolled out a new Reporting tab for Business customers that allows you to see which landing page & referring sources are driving traffic and conversions for your campaign.
You can also use this report to track down valuable traffic sources, partner activity on campaigns via query strings or specific landing pages on certain domains.
We've built this in a way that also shows you the proper referring sources when the campaign is embedded on your own site or a partners.
We've rolled out a new rule for Captures that allows you to display your Capture within a specific fenced area on a map. You can add multiple locations to each Capture.
You can check this rule out under: Geolocation > Geofence
This included a change to the default rate limits for POST endpoints, which is one that we use heavily for one click Tweets, Follows and Retweets in campaigns.
At this stage Twitter / X has not approved our application to maintain previous POST rate limits for the following reason:
Do not (and do not allow your users to) simultaneously post identical or substantially similar content to multiple accounts.
This means that any Twitter / X actions that were once click to enter will now require multiple steps to first complete the action, then verify it (if you already Follow a specific account it'll continue to be one click).
We apologise for any impact this might have and we're continuing to explore options with Twitter / X to restore some (if not all) of this functionality.
Many customers have been asking for a way to ensure they can filter out low quality social profiles from entering specific campaigns (particularly Rewards).
Today we've add a new option for Twitter actions that allows you to prevent users with throwaway, temporary or low quality accounts from completing certain Twitter actions.
This looks at a number of factors in the users Twitter accounts to determine the quality of the account and can be enabled or disabled per campaign.
Until today we only ever showed a users Avatar inside a campaign if they had a Gravatar setup. This made it difficult to glance through users or Winners (ask they all appeared to have no profile images).
We're now pulling Avatars from social sources that the user authenticates with and gives us permission to use, this should give your data a much more real feeling rather than seeing blank avatars for most users.
You can now add an additional layer of security to your Gleam account with Two Factor Authentication using any Authenticator app, via your User Settings.
We added additional support for users who are using the new gtag.js implementation of Google Analytics, this should ensure that Cross Domain tracking works correctly with this implementation out of the box.
The CTA option in Capture has been moved to the Design tab and added to all plans now. Business has the ability to further customise the behaviour of the CTA to redirect instead of close.
To help assist with GDPR compliance we've rolled out the ability to add Checkboxes to all Capture templates.
A few template styles do not naturally suit checkboxes, so they will feature a two step agree workflow instead. You will see this during setup under Agree Step.
To help assist with GDPR compliance for all customers, if you setup a Custom Field checkbox to Auto-tick it will no longer do this for any users in the EU.
Today we're excited to release Early Access for Capture and our completely reworked Gallery app to existing customers 🕺
For the next 6 weeks, you can take advantage of a limited time special offer to get Early Access to our New Features + more at a hugely discounted rate.
What this gives you access to:
Competitions
Rewards
Gallery (New)
Capture (New)
Team Management
Access to any new apps we release + ongoing feature improvements
On February 12th 2018 we're releasing a new version of our Gallery app and also releasing Capture to the public. In order to do this we've had to make some changes to how our plans and pricing are structured.
Pricing and features for existing Competitions subscribers will remain the same (Pro will be increasing by $10/month for new users)
Rewards will no longer be part of the Competitions plan
Captures is coming out of BETA and will require a paid plan to use
We're launching a new paid version of our Gallery app (some existing Gallery features such as imports will now require an upgrade)
We're trialing a new Hobby plan (from $10/month)
In order to balance the new Plans, some features will be removed from the Free plan (for new signups after February 12th)
We're offering discounted access to all the new features for existing customers
Beyond February 12th new and existing customers will be able to buy a full package which provides access to all our apps or just choose to subscribe separately based on what you need
If you choose to remain on a legacy Competitions plan your features will remain frozen as they are today (for as long as you remain on that plan), you will need to switch across to the New Plans to access new feature releases
Today we're rolling out the first iteration of our Custom Field Sync for Subscribe actions. This will allow you to sync any Custom Fields from the User Details form to supported email providers.
Initial rollout supports Mailchimp & ConverKit with more on the way.
We're also planning to allow you to sync hidden fields like Viral Share URL, Country & Referrer soon.
You can now set a billing contact against a specific credit card in your Account tab. This will override the invoice details allowing you to have more specific fields like Name/Address/VAT/Tax details.
This is our first major update to Capture and now means that we'll be moving towards rolling release cycles for this app (similar to what happens with Competitions + Rewards).
If you have existing Captures you'll need to upgrade them to access the new Features. Existing Custom Captures will continue to work, but will need to be re-implemented using the new Templating system to take advantage of new features.
The first iteration of Captures loaded each Capture in an iFrame, which for the most part worked well and also meant that there were less potential styling conflicts with the page. This new iteration now loads the Capture natively on your page, which allows more control over how fast they load, how smooth the transitions are, and most importantly.....styling.
We've simplified the HTML and CSS for all of our existing templates including making them all completely mobile friendly. Doing this will now allow us to easily roll out more templates or variations on a particular style of capture.
It will also allow you to easily make CSS changes to existing Captures (more on that below).
We've built a new Template and Layout structure so you can filter through which type of Capture you'd like to create. We have a huge range of new Capture types coming in our next update.
The Preview pane now shows you how your Capture looks at all widths (resize screen to play), along with a handy toggle to show how it looks on mobile devices.
You can also preview all states of your Capture: Before + After
Ever wanted to make a change to an existing template? Well now you can. Our CSS editor allows you to override or customise existing CSS elements in a Capture template to your hearts content.
We've rolled out a new improved version of Custom Captures that anyone using the BETA can use right away. This allows you to completely design your own Capture form along with CSS + HTML to use inside Gleam.
As an added bonus, Custom Captures are also embeddable!
Popups are fantastic, however inline content forms are also a huge way to convert users into valuable subscribers. You can now convert most Capture types to be embeddable, which means you can embed them inside your content, or sidebars or wherever you want - they will automatically expand to fit the div.
Keep an eye out for more embed specific templates coming real soon.
Rather than having one huge group of rules (like in the previous version), you can now chain groups of rules together via an OR statement. This allows you to give more purpose to a single Capture, for example:
Show this Capture to Returning users OR Show this Capture to New users that have looked at 30 pages
We've added some new snazzy rules for you to play with in this update also.
Schedule: This category has some rules that allow you to schedule when Captures show to a user. This is great for day parting your campaigns, or even scheduling a campaign to start and stop at a specific time or date.
You can also schedule in your local timezone or in the users local timezone. Which means you could always show a Capture at 6pm to someone no matter where in the world they are.
Ad Blocker: This rule detects if the user is using an Ad Blocker and allows you to display a Capture (or not) accordingly.
We have released our Capture app, which allows you to capture and send email to over 21 email providers using advanced behavioural rules on your website. More info our our email capture page.
