Building campaigns

A campaign defines your referral offer end to end: what counts as a successful referral, what each side earns, and how the invite experience looks. This guide walks through the Campaigns section of the dashboard. For the underlying model, see Campaigns.

Start from a template

Start with a built-in template, then customize its qualification gate and rewards:

• Templates — four built-in starting points, each pre-filling a valid qualification gate and a sensible default reward configuration:

  Template	Referral validates when the referred user…
  Signup	Creates an account
  Signup + verification	Creates an account and verifies their email or phone
  Paid subscription	Starts a paid subscription (pairs with RevenueCat, Adapty, or Stripe Billing events)
  Custom	Completes any combination of events and gates you define

The qualification gate builder

The gate builder is where you define what counts as a referral — no JSON to write and no schema to learn. You add one condition per event you want to require, and configure each in place:

• Event pickers are populated from events Invitebase has actually seen from your app (per mode) — you select real event names, not free-text guesses. You can also pre-register event names before instrumentation ships.
• Required or optional — mark each condition required (all required conditions must be met) or optional (any one optional condition suffices), so a single gate can express both "all of these" and "any of these" logic.
• Target — set a number the condition must reach. If the event carries a value or count, those sum toward the target across occurrences; otherwise each occurrence counts as one, so a target of 3 means "happened at least 3 times."
• Property restriction — narrow a condition to events matching the properties that matter, e.g. only subscription_started where plan is paid.
• Qualification window — how long the referred user has to qualify before the referral expires.

A "Paid subscription within 14 days" gate is one required condition on subscription_started, restricted to plan: paid, with a 14-day window.

Invalid conditions — an unknown event, a missing target — are flagged inline before save, so a gate never fails at evaluation time. Per-condition progress against a live gate is visible on the referral (gate_progress) in the dashboard and on the API.

Score-based qualification

Instead of (or alongside) boolean gates, you can assign point values to tracked actions — add a profile picture = 2 points, complete a workout = 8 — and validate when the referred user's total crosses a threshold. The action catalog lists every event type your app has tracked; assign points, set the threshold, mark any steps as mandatory, and cap how much any single event type can contribute.

Test the rule before saving

The builder includes a live rule tester: pick a sample user (a seeded test participant or any real test-mode user) and see pass/fail per gate for the current draft, updating as you edit. For deeper step-by-step evaluation — matched events, actual vs required property values, window state — use the rule inspector.

Eligibility and grace period

Two settings next to the gate builder decide the edge cases of who can enter the funnel at all:

• Eligibility — whether the referred user can qualify in the first place, checked before the gates run: restrict qualification to new users only or allow returning users, set how old an existing account can be and still count as "new," and choose whether users with prior paid-subscription history qualify. Ineligible referrals are rejected before validation — never billed, never counted toward a referrer's totals.
• Grace period — how long after signup a late code still attributes (24 or 48 hours is the common choice). This rescues the friend who installs, signs up, and only then remembers the code — the referral is attributed as if the code had been present at signup. Longer forgives more honest mistakes but widens the window for existing-user abuse, so keep it in hours or a couple of days, not weeks.

Choose your rewards walks through picking these values.

Reward configuration

The reward step defines what each side earns when a referral reaches validated — rewards never fire on merely linked referrals. See Rewards and payouts for the model.

• Method — app grants (free access for any number of days, weeks, or months; or an in-app unlock), money rewards paid through Invitebase (from the prefunded balance on Growth and above) (store gift cards, prepaid Visa cards, charity donations, or cash; Indie includes gift cards and charity), or manual fulfillment (tier-triggered rewards a human delivers, like swag — Invitebase detects the tier and tracks fulfillment state).
• Sided-ness — single-sided or double-sided, with independent config per side (referrer and referee).
• Amounts and currency — fixed value per validated referral.
• Milestones and tiers — "after 5 referrals, unlock X"; tier crossings can trigger manual-fulfillment rewards and owner alerts.
• Caps — maximum rewards per referrer, per campaign, and per rolling month. Caps limit your reward budget.
• Expiry — how long an earned reward stays claimable.

Copy and appearance

The Appearance step themes every end-user surface from one place: the refr.link offer page, the in-app invite screen, the referrer status page, and notification email templates. One theming model (logo, colors, typography accents) is shared across surfaces, with per-surface copy overrides — headline, offer copy, share text, email subject lines.

Every surface has a live preview as you edit, and defaults derive from your app icon and campaign config so surfaces look right with zero editing. Appearance changes have their own draft/published state, and publishing is versioned and audit-logged.

Draft, test, go live

Campaigns move through a deliberate lifecycle:

1. Draft — the campaign exists but attributes no referrals. Build gates and rewards freely.
2. Test — activate the campaign in test mode. Use the event simulator to walk a synthetic referral through clicked → signed_up → in_progress → validated → reward and confirm your webhook receiver handles the lifecycle.
3. Live — activate in live mode. Real referrals start being attributed immediately.

From the campaigns list you can pause any campaign — new referral attribution stops immediately, existing referrals keep evaluating — and reactivate it later. Every state change is confirmed and audited.

Editing a live campaign

Campaigns aren't versioned. Saving a change to a qualification gate or reward configuration takes effect immediately and applies to everyone right away, including referrals already in flight. Rewards already paid out never change; any pending, not-yet-fulfilled reward is re-evaluated against the new criteria. There's no version history and no rollback — to undo a change, edit the campaign back.

What's next