Perkzilla Review: Is This Giveaway Tool Right for You?
It’s been a long wait, but the Perkzilla review is finally here! To test it thoroughly, I ran a live giveaway in April.
And I tested it again recently to write this review. If you’re thinking of using Perkzilla to run your giveaways, then read this review.
Overall Score for Perkzilla
✅ Functionality: 3.5/5 (⭐⭐⭐)
✅ Easy to Use: 3/5 (⭐⭐⭐)
✅ Overall User Experience: 3/5 (⭐⭐⭐)
✅ Support: 5/5 (⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐)
✅ Offer: 5/5 (⭐⭐⭐⭐)
➡️ Overall: 3.9/5 (⭐⭐⭐⭐)
Perkzilla: The Good Parts
✅ I drove 50K+ traffic with no major issues
- Perkzilla’s core features are already working – you can run giveaways and acquire leads with it.
- It was able to handle the traffic spikes during the first and last few days.
✅ Accurate referral tracking
- Incentives for participants to invite their friends are one of the most important benefits of running a giveaway.
- Each friend they invite increases their points or entries.
- As a result, they are more likely to win or can unlock prizes if they reach certain milestones.
- During my giveaway, Perkzilla’s referral and point tracking is accurate.
✅ Allow participants to complete custom tasks and verify their completion.
- Almost every giveaway tool lets you create custom actions for your participants to complete and earn points.
- But only a good tool has a system to help you verify them.
- To enable it, click “Two-Step Verify”…
You have 3 options…
- Auto-Approve all — approve the completed task automatically and let the participant redeem his points immediately.
- Specific Answer — participant has to enter the right answer in order to redeem their points.
- Manual Approval — giveaway owner has to approve each completed task before points are added into the participant’s account
👉 I compare it to Upviral because it’s a mature giveaway tool that serves as a benchmark for newer ones. I’m also familiar with it.
👉 Upviral does not have Manual Approval, which is fine, I don’t recommend using it either.
👉 It takes a lot of time to manually approve each completed task. In addition to not getting their points immediately, some participants follow up with you relentlessly to get them approved. That means you get a lot more support tickets. If your giveaway is big, this feature itself is like a full-time job!
👉 Upviral has both “Auto-Approve” and “Specific Answer” but the way they handle the latter makes it easy for participants to cheat.
👉 Instead of typing the correct answer, participants can choose from multiple answers. Only one is correct.
It’s silly coz participants can just trial & error until they find the correct answer 😂
💡 When do we use this verification method?
It’s useful when you want your participants to pay attention to a particular page, and you hide a secret code in one of the sections.
Or when you want your participants to stay till the end of a webinar and you share the secret code at the last minute.
💡 Ken’s recommendation: Use Auto-Approve for most cases
“What?! Then some people will cheat and still earn points!”
They can cheat but they can’t win.
You can make it clear that completed tasks for all winners will be manually checked and cheaters will be disqualified. You will save a lot of time by doing this instead of manually approving tasks.
You will also avoid unhappy participants if you are too slow in approving tasks.
✅ Hide Perkzilla’s branding & Send emails via your SMTP
Perkzilla’s branding can be completely hidden throughout the platform, including in emails.
Add your own logo, disable Perkzilla’s branding, and use your own domain for the landing page. They recently introduced the CNAME feature so you can use your own custom domain too.
With your own SMTP server, you can also hide Perkzilla’s branding in emails and improve email deliverability.
🐞 Issue: Some participants and Perkzilla users have reported that sometimes emails sent via Perkzilla do not arrive. According to the founder, the issue has been resolved. If you want to play it safe then send it via your own SMTP.
✅ 3 Unique email automation triggers
Most giveaway tools have the welcome email automation where new participants get a welcome email.
Perkzilla has that and a few additional cool ones.
👉 Rewards/ Milestone — sends email to redeem a reward when a user hits a certain milestone. (But I can’t find a way to show this milestone on the widget page to motivate users to earn points. A workaround is to use your own landing page builder and show whatever info you want)
👉 Notify — sends a message to all users on a specific date or [x] days from sign up/ campaign completion. (Very important feature and not available on Upviral)
👉 Inactivity — when a user is inactive (no shares, referrals, or points) for [x] days, send a message.
👉 Motivate — when a user is is close to a reward, send an email motivating them to complete that final action.
👉 Winner — Perkzilla automatically chooses the winner and send them an email.
❗Feature Request:
👉 Sends an email on suspicious activity (to deter fraud)
👉 Sends an email for every successful referral (to encourage more sharing)
✅ Detects fraud better with detailed info for each participant
In my experience, most giveaway tools are not very effective at detecting fraud. In my previous giveaways, very few or no frauds have been detected.
Most of the time, participants can avoid being detected by using a VPN.
In fact, Perkzilla has the same problem too.
However, you can check each winner for suspicious activities using detailed information they provide about each participant.
For e.g. the following are the top scorers for my recent giveaway
❗The fraud prevention system wasn’t able to detect them.
But I noticed something strange when I looked at the numbers.
Take the first person as an example. How did he get 624 referrals from 149 unique visits? 🚩 Red flag!
In order to investigate further, I skimmed through his list of 600 referrals to look at their names, emails, IP addresses, and other information.
(Perkzilla does share these details. You have to request them through support.)
Many of these top scorers who would have won were disqualified.
Upviral
Vyper
🏆 Verdict: Perkzilla wins!
✅ Really good support
The level of support I get from preparation to launch is incredible.
The first time I tested it, some important features weren’t there.
For e.g. we could not verify tasks completed by participants. The founder understood the importance of the feature, and it was prioritized and implemented.
Other support queries were handled quickly, usually within a day.
The team goes above and beyond to diagnose and fix problems.
If the issue is complex, they record a video to assist you.
As Perkzilla grows, I hope they maintain this high level of support.
✅ Active Changelog since launch of V.3 (Dec 2020)
Some LTDs do not have much updates. Eventually, you start to wonder if it is still alive. Especially if basic issues and bugs remain unresolved.
It’s like houses not maintained or cleaned for a long time, how can it retain customers and attract new ones?
Perkzilla’s changelog is active and consistent since their V3 revamp at the end of 2020.
You can check it out here.
✅ Big list of Integrations for a LTD
A LTD usually works on integrations last. It’s understandable since they need to spend more resources on improving their core features.
Perkzilla has a decent list of integrations with popular email tools. Some of them are LTD favourites like Vbout, Acumbamail, Maillercloud, and Sendinblue.
If your email tool is not listed there, you can use their Webhook feature to build your own.
The Issues With Perkzilla
😑 You need another tool to build a landing page for your giveaway.
❗Perkzilla does not have a landing page builder.
They do have a widget which you can use as a landing page by driving traffic directly to this widget page. With the CNAME feature live, you can show your own domain branding on the URL. (e.g. giveaway.yourdomain.com)
However, the widget style is basic.
If you want a customized look or need more space for content, then you’ll need to build your own landing page with a different tool and embed the Perkzilla widget on it.
❗See my previous giveaway landing page and Perkzilla widget here.
😑 Only 1 widget style/ template
With no landing page builder, I was hoping there were more widget templates to choose from.
The selection area for templates appears to have a variety of options.
Upon closer inspection, I realized they are just different header colors of the same template.
Here’s a close up look of the widget.
➡️ Don’t worry you can still customize this widget further and add more content.
Below are all the options available:
- Turn on/ off banner (the green section at the top)
- Enable/ disable box style
- Turn on/ off countdown timer
- Show/ hide no. of entries
- Show/ hide Leaderboard
- Turn on/ off featured image (you can display an image right below the banner)
- Turn on/ off heading & description (shown right below the featured image)
- Turn on/ off teaser image & description
If this style is good enough for your giveaway then congrats, you can build everything on Perkzilla without the need of a separate landing page.
However, let’s say you want a customized look to explain the prizes better. Or add more sections and content, then it’s not possible with the Perkzilla widget.
❗In my opinion, the current template is acceptable for mini-giveaways. Or when your audience already knows what to expect so you don’t need a lot of content and sections to explain and encourage them to join.
😑 The Leaderboard only shows the top 6 scorers
In a competitive giveaway where the top scorers win, you’ll want your participants to easily learn four things
- Who are at the top spots
- Who are in front of them
- Which position are they currently in?
- How many points are needed to overtake the person in front.
Only the top 6 scorers are shown on Perkzilla’s Leaderboard
What if the participant is curious who is in the top 20? Maybe there’s a competitor in there that can spur the participant to refer more?
What if you have more than 10 prizes? Participants would want to know who gets spots 7 – 10.
It would also be motivating to know how many more points a participant needs to overtake the next person. The top scorer is hard to beat, but the person ahead is easier to beat.
Also, it doesn’t show the participant’s current position.
Overall, I feel that the Leaderboard could be improved to encourage more sharing.
😑 Annoying Bugs & Glitches
Even though the Perkzilla team is working hard to squash all the bugs, I still find myself feeling frustrated when setting up a campaign.
Although these bugs and UX issues are not major problems that would cause your giveaway to fail, they do add up and affect your experience.
Some examples:
👉 I have to use Perkzilla on Incognito mode or else the campaign set up won’t work. I later found out that it’s likely a conflict with one of my chrome extension.
👉 I can’t find a way to remove an uploaded image to a header. To fix this I have to change a template.
👉 Cannot bold, underline, change color on text editor.
👉 Features like turning on and off header are buried in the options that are hard to find for new users.
👉 I accidentally add 4 checkboxes but can’t remove them easily.
and more… You get the idea.
😑 Campaign analytics are basic
This is the analytics dashboard:
❗You only get information on sign-ups, not visits.
If you don’t know the number of visitors, you can’t measure conversion rates.
❗Also, you can’t measure the effectiveness of your promotion activities.
For e.g. if I ran a Facebook Ad, I would want to measure the visits, leads, and conversion rate each day to improve my campaign.
❗The “Total visits” metric doesn’t make sense
❗How can I only have 2k visits but 5k+ leads? Assuming the conversion rate of the landing page to be 10%, then I would have at least 50k+ traffic!
The founder explained this metric to me several times – a few times when the campaign was live and once when testing the software again for this review. And now I have forgotten what it means again. I think they need to give it a better name.
The next and final section of the analytics shows the information of your leads:
You can only view up to 10 leads. The “View all” button and the search function that shows up after that do not work.
That means to look for a specific lead, you’ll need to export it out.
And to find the top scorers beyond the top 10, you’ll need to export it out to Google sheets and create filters. I wish we can do it all right in Perkzilla.
➡️ Request:
- The ability to edit the point of participants
- Know how active each participant is. (e.g. how often do they visit the dashboard to grab their referral link and complete tasks)
- Know who invited the participant and who they have invited
- Traffic source
- Number of direct & referred visits and leads
- Email metrics (e.g. open rate, click rate…)
- A button to reset analytics (to get rid of tests before going live)
- View top performing tasks
To be fair, this is a common issue among giveaway tools. The other tools that I’ve tried like Upviral, Vyper and Woorise did not have this feature either.
Without “deep linking” on mobile, participants will be prompted to log into the Social Media platform when sharing your giveaway there.
This additional step kills the completion rate as many people will decide to abandon instead.
Sharing is the most important action you want your participants to take.
This should be one of the first few features implemented, but many giveaway tools overlook it.
🤨 Isn’t Perkzilla from the zoo (JVZoo)?
I asked the founder about their JVZoo launch, and the following is his response:
“I was the development partner at the time, and PromoteLabs handeled all of the marketing – honestly at the time I didn’t know much about the digital marketing space and trusted their approach to help make the platform a success…
Ultimately it didn’t align with the vision and values… I wasn’t proud to put my stamp of approval on the platform at the time even though I was the face of it.
Nearing the end of 2020, we parted ways and my team and I got back to the drawing board to totally rebuild the platform from the ground up, for PerkZilla v3… adding awesome new features such as the automation center, live editor, action builder and significantly easier, goal-oriented campaign set up.
We spent 12+ months to get the platform to where we want it to be, and honestly ran through any funds that we had from previous launches, with the vision to truly make something great with long term appeal.
If you know anything about me, I truly want each of our users to be successful while using the platform – and many of our AppSumo reviews highlight that as well… that’s why I’m manning chat support daily to really know what’s going on in the weeds with the platform, what we can improve, meet tons of lovely people looking to grow their brands and
accelerate feature requests to help make others successful…
Honestly in that time I don’t think I’ve even sent out an email, where as before you’d get something nearly daily and it would make me cringe… that’s why we had to part to build something our team can be truly proud of, and dedicated to grow alongside our awesome users.
The feedback I’ve been getting lately has been a complete 180 since parting with them, and each and every day we’re proud of what we’re adding to the platform…
To your points, I can 100% assure you that it’s been no where close to a quick money grab (it’s been years and I’ve re-invested nearly everything I have as I am dedicated to have it succeed in the long term)
Our support is now live chat support, rather than a slow ticketing system, and I aim to go above and beyond to help even with the strategizing of campaigns, well beyond the scope of traditional support…
We’re totally dedicated and are here to make this platform succeed, and that relies directly on our ability to help our users succeed!”
Final Thoughts about Perkzilla
Perkzilla has come a long way since its initial launch on JVZoo.
The features and UI are completely different.
Even the logo looks different 😛
Perkzilla Old Logo
Perkzilla New Logo
As long as they continue to listen to their users and keep up their development pace and awesome support, I can see them overtaking mature competitors.
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Will you give Perkzilla a shot? Tell me in the discussion thread »
