Prize groups are the part of an instant-win setup that people rush, and then spend the rest of the campaign firefighting. Get them right and the draw runs itself. Get them wrong and you either give away more than you meant to or run a competition nobody wins.
What a prize group actually is
A prize group is a prize plus how many of it exist plus which ticket numbers hold it. When somebody buys a ticket, the engine checks whether that number belongs to a group. If it does, they have won that prize. If not, no win.
The important consequence: results are decided at purchase, not at reveal. The interactive game that follows is showing an outcome that already exists. Nothing about how somebody plays changes it.
Structure them in tiers
The setups that work almost always look like this:
- One headline prize. The reason people came. One of it.
- A handful of mid prizes. Enough that winning feels possible.
- Many small prizes. Site credit, a free entry, a small discount. These do the actual work.
That bottom tier is what people underinvest in. A competition where nobody you know has ever won anything feels rigged, regardless of the maths. Frequent small wins are what make the headline prize believable.
The mistakes that cost money
Not doing the arithmetic. Total prize value against total ticket revenue if you sell out. Then against what happens if you only sell 40%, because the prizes are already committed and the revenue is not.
Forgetting instant wins come out of the same pot. If you are also running a main draw on the same product, your instant-win prizes are on top of that headline prize, not part of it.
Loading the winners into low ticket numbers. Early buyers clean up, late buyers get nothing, and it looks exactly as bad as it sounds. Spread them.
Leaving no small wins at all. A draw with one prize and two thousand tickets has 1,999 people whose experience of your site is "nothing happened".
Check the plumbing before you launch
Two settings gate the whole thing, and if either is off the reveal simply will not appear:
- Instant Win enabled on the product.
- Prize Groups enabled on the product.
Then buy a ticket yourself. Genuinely — put a real order through and watch the whole flow. Almost every "it is not working" support conversation ends at one of these two toggles.
Then make the reveal match the prize
Once the groups are right, the reveal is what people actually experience. A result card that shows the prize's own artwork lands very differently from one that says "You won: Prize Group 2".
If you have tiers, consider whether the reveal should reflect them. A headline win deserves to feel different from a £5 site credit. That is a settings decision, not a development one.
