User referrals

Boost your install rate with a referral program and offer users who invite their friends customized in-app rewards. Adjust can attribute new installs to referral links, letting you analyze the ROI of your referral campaigns and pinpoint high-value users who bring in the most new users.

How it works

When you run a refer-a-friend program, you incentivize your existing users to invite their friends to download your app. Here’s how it works:

  1. Oscar, down to their last life in your game, taps an in-app button to invite a friend in return for an extra life. This button contains an Adjust link URL with a label parameter appended.
  2. Your app populates the label parameter value with Oscar’s referral ID - a value that is non-sensitive user information.
  3. Your app sends the link URL, now containing Oscar’s referral ID, to their friend Mike. For instance, via email.
  4. Mike clicks the link containing Oscar's referral ID, which takes them to the relevant app store, where they download and install your app.
  5. Mike’s install is attributed to the link containing Oscar’s referral ID as the value in the label parameter.
  6. Adjust fires an attribution callback containing Oscar’s referral ID to your app’s Adjust SDK.
  7. Your app collects this information from the Adjust SDK and sends it to your BI system.
  8. Your system sends an in-app reward (in this case, an extra life) to Oscar for successfully inviting Mike.

Label parameter

Adjust uses the label parameter to receive custom data unrelated to attribution data. For user referrals, you can use it to tag your app users with unique IDs to deliver custom rewards. Find out more about the label parameter.

Note:
The label parameter value does not appear anywhere in Datascape and networks cannot receive the value through postbacks.

For customers who choose to use server callbacks to share the referral ID with Adjust, you can alternatively use a dynamic callback parameter.

Use cases

Incentivize existing users

Customize the new user experience

Next steps

  • Set up user referrals - Get instructions on how to set up and measure user referral programs with Adjust.
  • Branded links - Create short links with an important word or brand name as its visible part. For example: example.go.link. This establishes link authenticity, improves brand consistency, and increases click-through rates.