Referral

A referral is the basic transaction in affiliate marketing: one party sends a potential customer on to a store and is credited for it, because the click can be tracked. The referred visitor is called a referral, and if the visit becomes a purchase, the referral has become a conversion that triggers commission.

The word covers 3 related things. In web analytics, referral traffic is every visit that arrives with another website as the sender – measured on the HTTP referrer, with no agreement behind it. In affiliate marketing, a referral is a visitor or customer referred via a trackable affiliate link. And in recruitment, referral means referring new affiliates or stores to a network, often in return for a referral bonus.

The difference between an analytics referral and an affiliate referral is traceability. Analytics groups by sending domain and can neither settle nor attribute a sale to a specific partner. The affiliate referral carries a click ID, so the sale can be settled precisely. The 2 numbers rarely match: an affiliate referral can show up as direct in analytics if the referrer header is missing, while an ordinary link counts as referral without triggering any commission.