Customizing your giveaway and competition is an important factor in promoting and encouraging entries by contestants. By having an eye-catching featured image, it will attract the attention of contestants on social media platforms and/or your website.
When creating your giveaway, you’ll be presented with the following options under the “Customization” tab:
Configuration Options
The customization options allow you to include custom images/backgrounds which will be featured within your giveaway widget, alongside custom URL and social login configuration options.
– Images and Branding
Giveaway Image
The giveaway image is the featured image which will be shown at the very top of your giveaway, above the giveaway title, description and entry methods.
We recommend using a 4:3 or 16:9 aspect ratio for images, for example 1280×960/1280×720. The file size of the image should not exceed 5MB.
How it will appear on your giveaway:
Background Image [Premium & Business Plan]
The background image is what will appear in the background of the giveaway widget when a contestant visits your giveaway landing page. If you are embedding your giveaway elsewhere, such as your own website, the background image will not be displayed.
We recommend using a 16:9 aspect ratio for images, for example 1920×1080. The file size of the image should not exceed 5MB.
How it will appear on your giveaway:
Giveaway Video/Stream URL [Premium & Business Plan]
If you have a YouTube or streaming channel, you can choose to display a video/channel stream instead of the giveaway image at the top of your giveaway. This is ideal if you are looking to promote your channel, showcase details about the prize or keep streaming audiences engaged with your channel.
At this time, we currently support showcasing a YouTube video, or a live stream from Twitch.tv.
To show your video/stream, you simply need to include a link to the video/channel. For example, if you want to feature your Twitch.tv stream, you would enter your channel URL – example: https://twitch.tv/ninja.
Custom URL [Business Plan]
By default, we automatically generate a URL for your giveaway once it has been published. The URL is made up of 6 random characters which identify your giveaway, followed by a forward slash and the title of your giveaway. For example: https://givelab.com/dWNG5x/givelab-demo-giveaway.
We also provide a shortened URL under the domain name “giv.gg” followed by the 6 random character identifier. Instead of the URL being https://givelab.com/dWNG5x/givelab-demo-giveaway, it is shortened to: https://giv.gg/dWNG5x.
You can customize the URL of your giveaway to something unique, for example instead of https://giv.gg/dWNG5x, you could instead have https://giv.gg/mygiveaway.
To use a custom URL, enter the custom text you wish to use and want to show after the forward slash. Spaces are not allowed, however you can instead use “-” to separate each word.
– Details & Login
Hide total entries count from my giveaway
If you’d prefer to not show the total amount of entries accumulated by all contestants, you can choose to hide the total entries count to contestants completely. Instead they will see a “Your Entries” box which will display the amount of entries they have earned individually.
Social Logins
When a contestant first enters your giveaway and depending on the entry option selected, they will be shown a dialogue asking them to either create a “profile” by entering their First/Last name and Email Address, or instead login with a social media network to populate this information automatically.
An example of the dialogue can be seen here:
If you’d prefer to not show some of the social media login options, or want to disable the ability for contestants to enter with just their First/Last name and Email Address, you can make these changes.
To edit or remove social networks, you simply need to delete the options from within the Customization tab as seen below:
Note: Some entry steps will still prompt for social media login even if you de-select them. For example, if one of your steps is to Follow/Retweet/Tweet on Twitter, the contestant will first need to link their Twitter account to complete the step. We require account linking for some entry steps so we can validate the contestant has legitimately completed the entry.
The last step of the giveaway creation process is to choose visibility options. Read more here.