You can create as many referral codes as you need to track an acquisition campaign’s success
Prerequisites
Important: The referral code feature relies on two criteria for you to enable in your community:
- Your community needs to have the Web community enabled.
- Your community needs to be set as public and have ‘new member registration’ enabled.
Why use referral codes to track a campaign's success?
To grow your community, you might want to experiment with advertisements on different platforms. However you may currently struggle with knowing which is performing the best or worst. This all depends on a case-by-case basis. There isn't a one-size-fits-all platform solution..
While most platforms will offer the number of click-throughs, none are to tell you how many successful sign ups they’ve generated for you.
By creating a referral code per acquisition channel or per advertisement experiment, you’ll be able to identify which platform, ad campaign or any other acquisition channel is working best for your community.
What is a referral code?
A referral code is a unique code that helps you track visits and successful sign ups coming from a specific acquisition channel.
A referral code can be created by and associated to a member requesting one.
Referral codes can also be created by you from the Invite members page of the Console.
Each referral code has:
- a name, to help you identify and search/filter a referral code later on
- a creation date, which represents the day when the referral code was created
- the number of visits, which represents how many unique visitors have landed on the web sign up URL of your community with a referral code as parameter
- the number of signups, which represents how many new members have successfully registered coming from one of these visits
Creating unique referral codes to track your acquisition campaign’s success
From the Invite members page on the Console, you can create as many new referral codes as they wish.
These referral codes can not be associated with a member.
When running a community, you may want to experiment with advertisements to grow your community. While advertisement platforms will give you the number of clicks they generated, they won't give you the number of sign ups they generated.
By creating a referral code per advertisement campaign, you'll be able to track how many signups each ad campaign has generated.
These referral codes can be disabled/enabled by you or any admin, if you wish to.
While this won't be used by every host, it could be found useful to experiment on the same acquisition channel with two different campaigns. One running on week 1 and another campaign running on week 2. You wouldn't want the referral code of week 1 to still be active and skew the number of visits/sign ups by running on an extra week. Disabling a referral code doesn't cause any harm, it will just not increment the number of visits and sign ups of a referral code.
About the list of referral codes on the Invite members page
The list can be filtered, searched for or even sorted.
To sort by number of sign ups, you’ll need to click on the table header "sign ups", same goes for sorting by number of visits or creation date.
The filter will help you to filter the list to only show: all disabled referral codes, all enabled referral codes, and/or filter by name.
You can also quickly search by name, or username for the member the referral code is associated with.
As well as the above, you can look into the details of each referral code, just click on the number of sign ups a referral code has generated to identify which members have signed up with the selected referral code.
FAQ
- Can I use referral codes if I don't have the Web app enabled?
At this stage you aren’t able to use referral codes without the web app enabled. When someone clicks on the referral link they are taken to the sign up page of the Web community app. - Can I use referral codes if my community is private and set as "invitation only"?
If your community is private and only accessible via "login only", in other words if you have disabled the sign up page; you cannot use this feature. Each code can only be used as a parameter of the URL of the sign up page. If signing up to your community is disabled, then no one will be able to visit the sign up page and therefore register. - Why not send people to the Google PlayStore, or Apple App Store for people to download the mobiles apps directly?
At present we don’t support this, but it's something we're looking into for the future.
All visitors are currently redirected to the Web community app, on the sign up page, they can download the Mobile app from any store. Please note that if they download it before they register and register from the Mobile app, we won't be able to allocate that registration to the referral code used. However, if they sign up on the Web page, they'll be invited to download the Mobile app of their choice later on.