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Referral Attribution Overview

Referral Attribution is how Ambassador connects the dots between a referred customer and the advocate who sent them your way. It's what makes reward triggers work, journey automations fire, and your referral reporting meaningful. This article explains how it's structured, how it gets created, and what to know when managing it.

What Is Referral Attribution?

Referral Attribution links a referred prospect or customer to the advocate who referred them. This connection is typically created at the earliest tracked stage where you can capture the referred contact's email — such as a lead form submission, account creation, or purchase — after they've clicked a referral link, scanned a QR code, or entered a referral code on your site.

Note for legacy Ambassador customers: Referral Attribution replaces the need to create a $0 commission to log an initial referral event before conversion.

How Referral Attribution Is Structured

Each Referral Attribution represents a campaign-specific relationship between three things: an Advocate, a Referred Contact, and a Campaign.

The relationship is established using either an Advocate Shortcode or a Coupon Code.

How Referral Attribution Is Created

Automatically

In most cases, Referral Attribution is created automatically through one of these paths:

Data-layer integration (Contact Creation / Attribution event) — Your integration (HubSpot contact sync, the API referral_attribution/record endpoint, Salesforce flow, etc.) creates the referred contact and referral attribution in Ambassador before an order exists. This is commonly used to move the contact into the first stage of a Journey right away.

Data-layer integration (Order Creation) — If the referred contact and attribution haven't been created yet, your integration or a CSV import that creates an Order will also create the contact and referral attribution at that time — as long as the system can identify the referrer via shortcode or coupon code.

Referred Customer Widgets — When someone clicks a referral link or scans a QR code and submits their email through a Referred Customer widget on your site or an Ambassador-hosted landing page (to claim an offer or register as an advocate), the referral attribution is created automatically.

Manually

If you need to create a Referral Attribution by hand, follow whichever process fits your situation:

Create a Referral Attribution without an Order:

  1. Make sure the referring advocate exists as a contact with enrolled status and is assigned to the relevant campaign segment
  2. Make sure the referred customer exists as a contact (prospect or enrolled, depending on your use case)
  3. Go to Audience Activity > Referral Attribution > Create Referral Attribution
  4. Choose Add Manual or use a CSV Import
  5. If successful, an active Referral Attribution is created

Create an Order and Referral Attribution together:

  1. Make sure the referring advocate exists as an enrolled contact in the relevant campaign segment
  2. The referred customer does not need to exist yet — the Order will create them
  3. Go to Audience Activity > Orders > Create an Order for the referred customer (manually or via CSV Import), and include the advocate's email, shortcode, or coupon code
  4. If successful, Ambassador creates the contact (if needed), the referral attribution, and the order

Campaign Rules & Attribution Status

A few important rules to keep in mind:

Referral Attribution is campaign-specific. A single customer can have multiple referral attributions if they've been referred through different campaigns — but they can only have one active attribution per campaign at a time.

If a duplicate is attempted, the new attribution is created as Inactive (logging the attempt), while the original remains active.

To change a referral attribution to a different advocate:

  1. Find the current active attribution record and update its status to Inactive
  2. Create a new active attribution, or update the Inactive attempted one to Active

When an attribution is updated from one advocate to another, future orders and rewards will be assigned to the new advocate. Past orders and rewards will not be transferred.

Good to Know

  • A contact can have referral attributions in multiple campaigns simultaneously — attributions are scoped to a specific campaign.
  • The Attribution table (Audience Activity > Referral Attribution) is a great place to audit referral connections, investigate issues, or verify that automation logic is wiring things up correctly.
  • If referral attributions aren't being created as expected, check that your integration is sending the referring shortcode or coupon code correctly with each event.
  • Related articles: Journeys Overview, Orders Overview, Visitors Overview, HubSpot Integration Overview & Setup, Salesforce Managed Package Overview