How can I test referrals?
Testing your referral setup not only helps you better understand how it works, it's also a good way to make sure your setup is good to go.
With that said, we do every now and then receive inquiries from Prefinery customers like "my referrals aren't working" which in most cases is a result of their testing (faking a referral activity).
As the Prefinery account owner yourself running a test - signing up on your own campaign, clicking your own referral link, and then signing up yourself again to simulate a different user - will most likely not result in a recorded share or referral. Why? It's because of our fraud protection system as that behavior is exactly what you'll not want your users to be able to do.
We'd like to assure you that this is not something you'll experience with real users unless those users were trying to game the referral system.
Properly Testing Referrals
So, how do you test then? Here's what you'll just need to do:
You need to look as much like a real user as possible. Here are some ways to simulate different real users under the same IP address:
- Sign up from one computer (or phone) and click on your referral link from another computer (or phone). This simulates users on different devices.
- Sign up using your default browser, copy the referral link (don't click open it yet), then open up your browser's private/incognito window and paste in the link there to open it and signup again through that referral. This simulates users on different browsers.
- Sign up using your default browser (e.g. Chrome), copy the referral link (don't click open it yet), then open up a different browser (e.g. Firefox, Edge or Safari) and paste in the link there to open it and signup again through that referral. Like the above, this simulates users on different browsers too.
Referral Not Getting Counted?
Eventually your attempts will still get flagged as fraudulent, but you'll probably be able to test a couple referrals.
If having closely followed the above suggestions you were still not able to test out a referral, here are other factors you could look into: Why are referrals not getting counted?