Business & Payments
Referral
A user brought in through a referral program rather than paid media.
A referral is a user acquired through another user's recommendation — arriving via a personal invite link or promo code inside a referral program — rather than through paid media. The referrer earns a reward defined by the program, and the referred user is tracked to them, forming an organic acquisition channel that runs on existing users' networks.
Buyers care about referrals in two directions. Referral traffic is usually cheap and converts well on trust, but scales poorly and attracts incentive abuse — self-referrals and multi-account schemes that fraud teams hunt aggressively. Within affiliate networks and services, referrals are also a passive income line: refer another buyer to a network and earn a small override on their volume indefinitely.
In buyer speech
“A quarter of last month's deposits on that brand came in as referrals from players we bought — LTV on those is noticeably better.”