How to Build a Spin-to-Win Prize Table That Holds
Build a spin-to-win prize table as a budget: cost per spin, a try-again share, per-person caps, a daily allocation and CAP Code odds wording.
A spin-to-win prize table is a budget with a wheel painted on it. Fix what you can spend, price every segment, then cap what any one person or any one day can take, before you type a single percentage into the wheel. This guide works through that maths with a worked example and shows where Portico Play's limits and reports help you hold the line.
- Short answer: Divide your prize budget by your expected spins, price each segment against that figure, and add a try-again share, a per-person limit and a daily cap.
- First step: Write down two numbers from your own channel data: the money you will spend and the spins you expect.
- Goal: A table whose expected cost per spin sits under your ceiling, with stock that lasts to the last day and wording that shows participants the number and nature of the prizes.
Tips: Build the table in a spreadsheet before you open any wheel tool, and keep the sheet: it becomes your forecast when you read the campaign report later.
Key takeaways
A prize table is a cost model first and a piece of game design second. The money and the spin count decide what each segment may cost, the chances decide what a spin costs on average, and the limits decide whether one busy afternoon or one determined person can break the plan.
| Point | Detail |
|---|---|
| Budget first | Start from the money and the number of spins you expect, then work backwards to what each segment may cost. |
| Price every spin | Multiply each prize's cost by its chance and add the results to get the expected cost of one spin. |
| Limit the leaks | A try-again share, a per-person limit and a daily allocation stop one busy afternoon or one determined participant from emptying the stock. |
| Say it plainly | Show the number and nature of prizes, the closing date and the maximum plays per person where participants see them before they spin. |
Contents
- Step 1: Fix the budget and the number of spins
- Step 2: Price every segment and work out the cost per spin
- Step 3: Add a try-again share and a limit per person
- Step 4: Choose percentages or a scheduled allocation
- Step 5: Plan for the busy day that empties the stock
- Step 6: Word the odds and conditions, then check the report
- Frequently asked questions
- Sources
Step 1: Fix the budget and the number of spins
A prize table starts as two numbers: the money you will spend on prizes and the spins you expect. Divide the first by the second and you have the most one spin can cost on average. Every later choice, from the size of the top prize to the share of try-again segments, has to respect that figure.
Take both numbers from your own data. The spend is a decision. The spins are a forecast: the visitors, email opens, till receipts or event footfall that will reach the wheel, multiplied by the share you expect to actually spin. Use last year's comparable campaign if you have one, and be honest about how wide the range is.
Here is a fictional example, for illustration only. A coffee shop group plans a four-week wheel.
| Input | Example value | Where it comes from |
|---|---|---|
| Prize budget | £4,000 | A spending decision for the campaign |
| Expected spins | 10,000 | Email list size, footfall and a guessed take-up |
| Ceiling per spin | £0.40 | Budget divided by spins |
That £0.40 is an average. Most spins will cost nothing and a few will cost a lot, which is exactly why the next step prices each segment.
Skipping this step produces two familiar failures. The first is the wheel that overspends in week one because the prizes were chosen for how they look on the wheel, not for what they cost. The second is the wheel so tight that nobody wins anything and nobody comes back. Both come from never having a ceiling to test against.
Keep the prize budget separate from the cost of running the game. Portico Play's plans, prices and features are on the pricing page, and none of that figure belongs in your prize maths. Your ceiling covers prizes alone.
One more number is worth writing down now: the spins you would plan for if traffic doubled. You will use it in Step 5.
Step 2: Price every segment and work out the cost per spin
The expected cost of a spin is the sum of each segment's cost to the brand multiplied by its chance. Give every segment a real cost, including the try-again segment at zero, and add the results. If the total is below your Step 1 ceiling, the table fits.
Here is the coffee group's first draft, again a fictional example.
| Segment | Cost to brand | Chance | Cost × chance |
|---|---|---|---|
| £100 hamper | £100.00 | 0.1% | £0.100 |
| Free coffee | £2.50 | 3% | £0.075 |
| Free pastry | £1.50 | 5% | £0.075 |
| £1 off voucher | £1.00 | 10% | £0.100 |
| Try again | £0.00 | 81.9% | £0.000 |
| Expected cost per spin | 100% | £0.350 |
At 10,000 spins that is £3,500, inside the £4,000 budget with £500 of headroom. At 20,000 spins it is £7,000. The ceiling only holds while the traffic forecast holds.
Look at the hamper. A 1 in 1,000 chance sounds negligible, yet it costs 10p per spin, the same as the voucher at 10% and more than either the coffee or the pastry. Across 10,000 spins you should expect about ten hampers, or £1,000, which is a quarter of the whole budget going to ten people. Ten is an average, not a promise, and a lucky run of hampers is the cheapest way to blow a month's plan.
Work the campaign total the same way every time: expected cost per spin, times expected spins, compared with the budget. Then repeat it for a pessimistic spin count.
Tips: Price vouchers at what they cost you when used, not their face value, and remember that only some will ever be redeemed. Be cautious and use the higher figure until the report tells you the real rate.
You can try a wheel before you commit to one: the Welcome Wheel page shows how a branded wheel plays. Demo prizes there are made-up DEMO codes, so nothing is spent.
Step 3: Add a try-again share and a limit per person
A try-again share lowers the expected cost without taking the game away, and a per-person limit stops one participant from taking a disproportionate share of the stock. There is no universal safe percentage for try-again. The share falls out of the maths in Step 2: it is whatever is left once your priced prizes are in.
In the example, try-again is 81.9%. A wheel that gives something away on most spins would cost far more, and one that gives almost nothing may feel like a trick. Test the feel in preview with colleagues before you settle.
Limits need the same care as the chances:
- A try-again share: Count it as a real segment on the wheel, shown honestly, not hidden in the maths. Participants should be able to see that not every spin wins.
- A limit per person: Decide how many plays one participant gets over the campaign, or per day. A once-a-day wheel is easy to explain and gives people a reason to return.
- How the limit is counted: In Portico Play, an event campaign's limit counts the signed-in player where the session has one, and otherwise the device. The device count is best effort: a different phone or browser is a new participant, and a browser update can change it.
- What you can promise: Where players are signed in, the limit counts the signed-in player. Where they are anonymous, word it as a limit per person and plan the budget as though some people will get round it.
- Where the limit appears: The maximum number of entries per person is the kind of significant limitation that Lewis Silkin's guide to UK prize promotions says must appear in the marketing, alongside the closing date.
The same guide notes that prize draws must be free to enter or tied to a product at its normal price. If your wheel needs a purchase to unlock a spin, check that against your own advice before you launch.
Step 4: Choose percentages or a scheduled allocation
Percentages suit a table with many prizes and many spins, because the long run then behaves like the table. When the prizes are few, or the traffic is hard to predict, a schedule that releases a fixed number of prizes each day is the safer choice. If you have ten hampers and a wheel that might get 2,000 or 40,000 spins, do not leave the hampers to chance.
The reason is simple arithmetic about time. With a 0.1% chance, you expect one hamper per thousand spins, but expecting is not delivering. A quiet week might hand out none and leave you holding all ten for the last day. A viral afternoon might hand out six before lunch.
A percentage describes a long run, but a campaign is a short one. The fewer prizes you have, the less the percentage means, and the more a fixed daily allocation protects you.
That is the point most guides skip. They explain how to type 0.1% into a segment and stop there. Nothing in the percentage tells you how many prizes will leave the building by Wednesday.
A practical split works for many brands. Keep percentages for the small, plentiful prizes where volume smooths out the luck: vouchers, free extras, small discounts. Use a schedule for the scarce, expensive ones: the hamper, the tickets, the device. Decide how many of the scarce prizes are available each day and release them across the campaign.
The cost is some predictability for the participant. A scheduled prize can run out for the day, so the wheel needs to behave sensibly when it has: either that segment is skipped, or the spin lands on something else. Say that in the conditions rather than leaving people to discover it.
If you want to verify how a result was decided afterwards, Portico Play's fairness page explains how rewards are verified. That checkability is worth more to a marketing manager than a clever curve, because it is what you show a sceptical finance director or a complaining participant.
Step 5: Plan for the busy day that empties the stock
Stock runs out on the best day of your campaign, not an average one, so the table needs a daily cap, a reserve and a decision about what happens when a pool is empty. Work these through in order:
- Set a daily cap for each scarce prize. Divide the stock by the days left, then hold some back. If your spin forecast doubles on a launch day, the cap is what keeps the hampers for week three.
- Know when your day turns over. Portico Play's campaign time zone means daily limits and once-a-day plays turn at midnight there, not in UTC. Check that the zone matches your audience, or a late-night player in your market gets someone else's day.
- Hold back a reserve. Keep a share of each scarce prize out of the daily release, to cover errors, disputes and the day traffic surprises you.
- Hold the last prize for the person who drew it. Portico Play sets a limited prize aside for the session that drew it before the table is committed, so two people cannot draw the last one at once.
- Load codes into a pool and watch it. Prize codes sit in a pool. Portico Play generates codes in the form PREFIX-XXXXXX from an alphabet that leaves out 0, O, 1, I and L, so a code read over the phone is not misheard.
- Decide what an empty pool does. Options are to skip that segment, to land on a smaller prize, or to queue a manual hand-over. Portico Play's fulfilment queue lists prizes a person has to hand over, including codes that ran out and messages that failed, with an owner and a note on each.
- Honour what you advertised. The CAP Code, Section 8 expects promoters to run promotions equitably, promptly and efficiently (8.2), and to state the number and nature of prizes (8.17.6). If you showed ten hampers, plan to be able to give ten.
Tips: Write the empty-pool decision into your plan before launch, with a named person who owns the fulfilment queue. The worst time to design a fallback is the afternoon you need it.
A calendar campaign is a natural fit for daily allocation. The Christmas Calendar opens one door a day, and only eight of its doors are prize days; the rest are played for fun.
Step 6: Word the odds and conditions, then check the report
The wording is part of the table. CAP Code Section 8 expects the number and nature of prizes to be stated (8.17.6), chances not to be exaggerated (8.20) and significant conditions to be communicated (8.17). Show these where participants see them before they spin, not only in terms linked from the footer.
Before the first spin, check that you can see each of these:
- The prizes: The number and nature of each, matching the stock you actually hold.
- The chances: Wording that does not make winning sound likelier than it is. If most spins are try-again, do not describe the wheel as "win every time".
- The limit: The maximum plays per person, as Lewis Silkin's guide to running prize promotions in the UK says significant limitations such as this must appear in marketing.
- The dates: The closing date, and what happens to unclaimed prizes.
- The privacy notice: The same guide says one must be shown before entry.
Then run the campaign against your forecast. Portico Play's report shows sessions, plays, participants, awards, claimed, delivered, redeemed and failed, per channel over a range of days, with previews and test players left out, and a CSV of the same numbers. Compare awards by prize with the Step 2 expectation, and claimed with delivered, since a prize that is awarded but never delivered is a support queue waiting to happen.
If the report shows you are running ahead, change the table while the campaign runs. Portico Play holds changes to a published campaign as a draft until you publish, with versions to roll back to, and you can preview the change first without spending anything. Adjust a daily cap, lift the try-again share or retire a prize, then note the change in your conditions if it affects what you advertised.
When you are ready to pick a mechanic, the game catalogue shows the wheel alongside the alternatives.
Frequently asked questions
How many segments should a spin-to-win wheel have? Enough to carry your priced prizes plus a try-again share, and no more. Eight to twelve is common, but the number follows from the table in Step 2. More segments mean more rows to cost, more wording to show and more ways for the odds to confuse participants.
What is a safe share of 'try again' segments? There is no universal figure. The share is what remains after you have priced your prizes against the Step 1 ceiling. In the fictional example above it came to 81.9%. If the maths needs a higher share than feels fun, cut the top prize or raise the budget, not the honesty of the wording.
Can I stop one person winning the top prize more than once? Largely, yes. Set a limit per person, and make the top prize a one-win-per-participant rule in your conditions. For signed-in players the count follows the signed-in player. For anonymous play it is counted by device on a best-effort basis, so a different phone is a new participant. Plan your budget with that in mind.
What happens if a prize runs out while the wheel is still live? Decide in advance. The options are to skip that segment, to land on a smaller prize or to queue a hand-over, and your conditions should say which. Daily caps and a reserve make this rare. Where prizes still need a person, Portico Play's fulfilment queue lists them with an owner.
Do I have to publish the odds on a prize wheel in the UK? The CAP Code asks promoters to state the number and nature of prizes and not to exaggerate chances of winning. It does not read as a demand for a percentage on every segment, but showing clear odds is the easiest way to avoid exaggerating. Take legal advice on your own promotion, since this article is not legal advice.
Sources
- CAP Code, Section 8: Sales promotions (ASA)
- Digital/commerce creative 101: running prize promotions in the UK (Lewis Silkin)