Referral / Invite
Intermediate PronunciationEN/rɪˈfɜrəl ˈɪnvaɪt/
Referral, or invite, is a mechanism in which an existing user deliberately brings a new person to the product, usually with a reward for both sides.
The channel is measured as a four-step funnel: users who sent an invite, invites sent, invites accepted, and of those, the people who became active. The largest mistake is reporting invites sent as growth; a sent invite is a cost, not an outcome, and only the last step creates value. A naming collision also trips teams up repeatedly: in web analytics tools the word referral means traffic arriving from a link on another site, which has nothing to do with an in-product invite programme.
FAQ
Referral traffic is inferred from the browser's referrer header and covers any link from any other site, including a mention in a blog post. A referral programme is an in-product capability with a per-user link or code, and measuring it requires the product itself to record the inviter-to-invitee relationship.