Before awarding overall winners and top prizes we recommend someone do a human sanity check on the “winner”. We have a lot of data, that most platforms don’t, that makes this check extremely simple to do.

There are generally obvious indicators to ANY person who handles the prize distribution. By simply looking at the list of referrals someone has generated you can a lot more than the IP address with KickoffLabs:

A general checklist when looking at the list of people someone has referred to validate them. Here is an example of someones referral list with a bunch of fake data that’s easy to spot:

1. If the IP addresses are all the same

This is an indication that they all used the same computer to sign up. If you see this repeatedly you may want to enable IP blocking from our campaign settings to block the bad IP addresses.

2. If the email address look fake…

They probably are. We’ve seen people generate josh1111@gmail.com, josh1112@gmail.com, etc. In most cases the dummy gmail accounts come with a pattern that’s easy to spot.

3. If there is no social data available

For every email address we collect we also search the web for social data about the person. In the case of the dummy email addresses you would not see:

• A social media account like a Facebook, Linkedin, or Twitter profile. It’s easy to generate a fake email. Much harder to generate social data for all of them. They would look like they are people that didn’t exist on the web.
• A profile picture. A lack of profile pictures in your lead or referral list is a quick visual indicator. You should see a good mix of people with profile pictures our solution is able to find.

4. Someone with ONLY direct referrals is suspicious if they have a lot of them

Assume you see someone with 100 direct referrals, but ZERO indirect referrals. Meaning that NONE of their referrals also referred anyone else. That generally doesn’t happen. It’s another indicator that something is being rigged. “Ghosts” don’t refer other people.

5. Time span that the referrals are generated

If you see someone with 100 referrals that all came within 1 hour… that’s a dead giveaway someone automated them. Real referrals take time for the person to post/email their friends and for their friends to read and react.

6. Regular intervals for signups

See one referral coming in every minute? Great someone spaced out their automation. But did they randomize the times between sign-ups… like you’d see in real life?

It’s VERY challenging to pass all of those checks.

Would I give away one million dollars with a system like this in an automated way? No.

Would I give away prizes at the hundred to thousand dollar level? Yes. Everyday customers do.

You can assume that for anything higher than 10 referrals only 2-3% of entries will ever reach that count. It’s generally a small enough number you can check everyone personally and look at their referral list to see if it’s full of “Ghosts”.

For higher value prizes

For higher value prizes I would enable our advanced fraud protection. This ensures that we never award scores or automatically distribute our viral emails without email addresses being confirmed. It also enables automated scoring so that you more easily scan for the issues above and more.

Need help? Let us know at support@kickofflabs.com!

The post Manually Detecting Fraud appeared first on KickoffLabs.

1. Create a reward campaign with a tracking block.  The slider will be split into as many parts as many rewards you add, in the example below there are two rewards added.
   
2. After you create a campaign, remove points for anything but referrals and set referrals = 1 point.
   
3. In Action tab delete all the other actions which have a score associated with them, except Refer Friends Online
4. Then, in the Refer Friends Online Action, you can add more social networks to the defaulted 3 icons (Facebook, Twitter and email).
   
   and then add additional sharing option by clicking on arrow next to “Add Network”.
   
   Once you select the desired additional sharing option, click “Add Network“. Repeat the process until you add all the options you need and click “Save Action“.
5. Now, when you have already set up scoring for referrals and deleted other possibilities of scoring points, you can change the wording for “points” to “referrals”. To do so, follow the path Setup>Advanced Settings>Localization
   
6. You could also add the point box in the status page for the leads to check how many referrals they have already achieved. To do so, click to edit the status page. When the status page opens in the editing mode, click “Add Content” and drag and drop the referral points box to the desired position and click “Edit“.
   
7. Now, change the “points” to “referrals” and click “Done“.
   
8. Now, the status page will show how many people have signed up due to the lead’s referral.
   

The post How to Create a Friend Referral only campaign appeared first on KickoffLabs.

In KickoffLabs it is possible to mix various campaign types. Below you will find an example of a campaign with a leaderboard and a multi-level reward widget to give smaller prizes.

1. Create a reward level campaign
   
2. Then add a leaderboard widget.
   To do so, click “Add content” in the left menu, then scroll down, select leaderboard and drag and drop to the desired position.

How to change campaign types without having to start the campaign over from scratch

Similar way like above to change the type of the campaign you do not have to delete your old campaign, instead you can delete the widget you no longer want to see on your page and drag a new one over.

So for example, if you are no longer happy with the rewards which are presented on the page you can delete the widget and leave just the leader board. To do so hover over the rewards and click the bin icon.

After deleting the widget that you no longer require, you can always add a different one.

The post Combining Campaign Types/Changing Type appeared first on KickoffLabs.

For more general guidance on ending your campaign (including emails you should send) check out this article.

1. Select a winner

Depending on the campaign you were running, you may choose different ways of selecting a winner.

A. If you are running a giveaway, you’ll want to use the “Pick a winner” feature as described here.

B. If you are rewarding the top X point totals then here is how you sort the lead list by score.

C. If you were running a reward level campaign and have to figure out what leads earned what rewards you can run a query by contest score for leads between X and Y points.

2. Deciding what to do with the landing pages

A. We suggest keeping the pages up but editing them to say something like “This contest is over, but enter your email address to be notified when we run another one. ”

B. If you decide to take the pages down here is how you can setup a redirect for specific pages or for the contest domain in general.

• here you can find information how to redirect the custom domain
• in a similar way you can also redirect a Kickoffpages sub- domain 

3. Decide what to do with Contest Box

A. If you decide to keep the Contest Box running, we suggest to update it in the same was as the landing page with a sentence similar to “This contest is over, but enter your email address to be notified when we run another one”. To do so, please, click “Edit“.

B. If you decide to turn off the Contest Box, please, click “Edit” and then select “off” and click “Save”

4. Update the countdown timer

As your contest has ended, it is important to make sure that the countdown timer is zero, if not then set it to a past date.

5. Download the leads

Now, when your contest is over, it is important to download the list of leads and add the leads to other subscribers you already had.

6. Campaign Results

Look at the reports and ask “Could we have improved the conversion rate? Could we have improved the Viral Sharing? How could we have improved the ROI.

7. Checklist

Now, when you ended your campaign, you can have a look at the following check list to make sure that you have not missed any step.

Need help? Let us know at support@kickofflabs.com!

The post How do I end a contest within KickoffLabs? appeared first on KickoffLabs.

This article explains how to add mobile sharing links to your campaign including SMS, Telegram, Facebook Messenger, and WhatsApp.

How to Add a Mobile Sharing Network

1. Open your contest thank you page for editing.
2. Click on the existing share links.
3. Click to “Add Share Link” in the left sidebar.
4. Select a mobile share network such as SMS Sharing
5. Add any share text. The leads individual share link will be appended to the text.
6.  

Previewing SMS or Mobile Network Sharing

We default to ONLY showing mobile sharing options on mobile devices. This means that if you test the landing page on your desktop computer you will NOT see the option.

1. You can preview it in our designer by clicking the preview tab and then selecting mobile as the preview.
2. You can publish the page and open it on your own mobile device.

Please note that not all devices support sharing via SMS, but it has been tested in latest iOS and Android releases.

The post How to add Mobile SMS, Telegram, Facebook Messenger, and WhatsApp Sharing to Your Contest appeared first on KickoffLabs.

To set your social share text/images for your campaign:

These settings will apply to all pages in your campaign, as well as any sharing that takes place via your auto-replies Emails.

From your campaign dashboard, select “Setup” > “All Settings” from the top nav. Here you can either get to the social defaults from the Landing page settings on the left or the Common Settings on the right. They both lead to the same place 🙂

Fill in the share properties for the various social media sites. If the platform isn’t listed, it’s most likely going to use whatever is set for the Facebook share settings since they use open graph. To learn how to set these properties, scroll down and follow the page specific settings portion of this guide.

Once you’ve finished updating your settings, scroll down and “Save” your changes.

To update social settings for an individual page:

1. Select the “Settings” from the left menu. At the bottom of the settings  we house the page level settings for Facebook + X. This setting is great if you have multiple landing pages and wanted to set different share defaults for each one. Otherwise, we recommend using the campaign level defaults above. Please note anything set at the page level will override the campaign default.
   
2. Be sure to Save and Publish your changes.

• Facebook pulls it’s share information from the page being shared. This is typically your signup page. Find our guide on updating your Facebook share information. If you’re having trouble with your Facebook share data, find our troubleshooting guide here..
• If you’re sharing a non-KickoffLabs page, you can find our guide on updating your Facebook share information HERE.
• We support the use of X (Twitter) Cards for sharing. If you’d like to use an image in your X (Twitter sharing), learn how to set that up HERE.

If you have any questions/concerns, reach out to us at any time at support@kickofflabs.com

The post Setting up Custom Social Sharing Messages appeared first on KickoffLabs.

With this feature you can make your campaign appear to be more successful at the beginning (which is a major mental hurdle for many) by (temporarily) inflating your current lead total.

To use it, just navigate to ‘The Fake Leads Jumpstart Feature’ from the Setup section of your campaign dashboard:

You will see a new screen, where you can set up the number of fake leads to be added and the maximum number of points for fake leads.

Need help? Let us know at support@kickofflabs.com!

The post Campaign Jump Start to Set a Starting Number of Leads or Points for Leads appeared first on KickoffLabs.

Click the image below to download the KickoffLabs Campaign Checklist.

The post How can I make sure my campaign is set up properly? appeared first on KickoffLabs.

1. Access your list of leads by clicking the “Leads” tab in the top menu of your campaign dashboard.
   
2. Under the Search box, click the blue “Add Condition” link and use the dropdown menu to choose a filter you’d like to apply. Use the field next to the dropdown to set any necessary conditions “True/False” or type your condition into the available text field. Then click “Search and Filter“. This will populate a list of your leads who meet that condition.
   You can apply more than 1 filter to your list of leads to narrow your results down even further.

Saving Your Lead Filter/Audience:

1. Follow the above steps to filter your list to your desired specifications. Then select the “Save Audience.” This will open a modal window.
   
2. In the modal window you can enter a name for your saved filter. You can also set which columns you’d like to be displayed in the lead list. When you’re through making your selections be sure to click the blue “Save Filter” button.
   
   
   

Managing and Exporting Your Saved Filter/Audience:

1. You can re-access your saved filter from the “Saved Audiences” tab in the Leads section of the campaign. 
2. To export as a CSV file, find the filter you’d like to export and click the Download link.
3. You can also delete the filter altogether by selecting “Delete“.
4. Quickly and easily create a new lead filter by clicking the “New Audience” button on the far right side of the screen. This will take you back to your Leads Dashboard to set up your new filter.
   

Feeling stuck? Shoot us a message at support@kickofflabs.com so we can help!

The post Search and Segment Leads Using Lead Filters/Saved Audiences appeared first on KickoffLabs.

1. Most Relevant – this is primarily used for free text searches (i.e., text you enter in the search box). It will order results by most relevant to the search term. This is the default sort order anytime you enter text into the search box.
2. Most Recent – leads are sorted by the date of initial signup. Most recent leads first (opposite of Signup Date).
3. Signup Date – leaders are sorted by the date of initial signup. Oldest first (opposite of Most Recent)
4. Total Referrals – leads are sorted by the number of referrals. Invalid/fraudulent leads are excluded from the count.
5. Verified Referrals – same as total referrals except on leads who have a verified email address are counted.
6. Contest Score – For Trial, Starter, and Professional plans this will be the same as the Total Referrals. For Business and Enterprise customers, this value will be the custom score if enabled. If custom scoring is not enabled, it will be the Verified Referrals if enabled. Otherwise, it will default to Total Referrals.

Find our full guides on Managing Your Leads and Using Lead Filters.

The post Sorting Search Results appeared first on KickoffLabs.