Referral at a positive moment

Fire the invite-a-friend screen at the exact moment the user just had a good experience — not from a static menu that nobody opens.

Use this when you run a referral program whose K-factor is low because the invite CTA is buried in settings. Don't use this when you have no working referral program to route users into. Surfacing a broken flow is worse than hiding it.

Goal

Users recommend apps when they feel good about them, and that feeling decays within minutes. A Settings > Invite Friends link captures almost nobody because it requires intent; the invite screen has to come to the user. This recipe fires the invite surface on a tracked positive moment — a milestone, a big win, a streak — and only shows it once, because the second ask after a good moment is worse than no ask at all.

Setup

In the dashboard

• Create a campaign referral-positive-moment.

• Trigger: event PositiveMoment with property kind in a defined allowlist ("streak_7d", "big_win", "first_export", etc.).

• Conditions: session_count >= 5, has_referred != true, subscription_status != "new".

• Action: fire yourapp://invite-friends, a dedicated invite screen pre-populated with a share message and code.

• Frequency: the has_referred != true audience condition suppresses the campaign permanently once the user shares. A user who dismisses without sharing keeps has_referred = false and may be re-asked at a later positive moment — add a native frequency cap (for example, once per 30 days) if you want to bound that.

In the app (engineering hand-off)

Note: session_count is not a built-in targeting attribute — the app must increment and set it as a custom property on each session start, e.g. amply.setCustomProperty("session_count", n).

• Pick the small list of real positive moments in your product. Fire them as one event with a kind property:

  amply.track("PositiveMoment", properties: ["kind": "streak_7d"])

• Register yourapp://invite-friends to an invite screen that uses the platform share sheet.

• On successful share, mark the user and track the outcome:

  amply.setCustomProperty(key: "has_referred", value: true)
  amply.track("ReferralShared", properties: ["kind": "streak_7d"])

How it runs

1. User hits a 7-day streak. App fires PositiveMoment { kind: "streak_7d" }.

2. Amply evaluates event-triggered campaigns. User has session count 12, has not referred anyone, is past the new-user window. referral-positive-moment matches.

3. Amply fires yourapp://invite-friends. The invite sheet opens over the streak celebration screen. The copy is short and references the streak.

4. User taps "Share" and picks a messaging app. App fires ReferralShared { kind: "streak_7d" }. App sets has_referred = true.

5. Next positive moment weeks later: the same campaign evaluates, sees has_referred = true, and does not match. The user is not asked again.

6. Parallel path: user dismisses without sharing. has_referred stays false. The campaign could match on the next positive moment of a different kind if you choose to allow that — or stay one-shot if you prefer.

Metrics to watch

• Invite open rate per kind. Some positive moments generate far more shares than others; double down on those.

• Accept rate of sent invites. The upstream CTA cannot fix a broken referral program downstream.

• K-factor before and after rollout. If it does not move, the moment-timing is fine but the incentive is wrong.

• Share of converted referrals who stick past 30 days. Referred users retain better than paid users when the program works.

Related

• Rate-review at a positive moment — the same pattern for store ratings

• Custom popups — for a lighter popup variant before the full invite screen

• Creating a campaign — building the event-triggered campaign

• Tracking events — firing PositiveMoment consistently

• Campaign delivery — once-per-user frequency caps

• AI-assisted integration — describe this campaign in plain language and have your AI assistant build it