Scrubbing and Shaving (Affiliate)

Scrubbing, also called shaving, is when an affiliate network or advertiser rejects, delays, or under-reports conversions that should have counted for payout. Some scrubbing is legitimate quality control, filtering out fraud or duplicate leads. Some of it is a network quietly reducing what it owes affiliates by voiding a percentage of otherwise valid conversions.

Legitimate reasons conversions get scrubbed#

Not every rejected conversion is a sign of bad faith. Advertisers commonly reject leads for:

• Invalid or disconnected phone numbers on lead-gen affiliate offers
• Duplicate submissions from the same click ID within a set window
• Traffic that fails a click fraud or bot check
• Chargebacks and refunds on sale-based offers, which claw back an already-paid commission

These filters protect advertisers from paying for conversions that were never going to produce revenue, and a healthy affiliate network applies them consistently with a clear rejection reason attached.

What abusive scrubbing looks like#

The practice earns its bad reputation when rejection rates spike without explanation, especially once an affiliate's volume grows, or when a network's stated approval rate doesn't match what other affiliates report for the same offer. Because affiliates rely entirely on the network's own numbers for conversion tracking, there's an inherent information gap: an affiliate has no independent way to verify a rejected lead was actually invalid unless they run their own postback URL tracking that logs every submission before it reaches the network.

How affiliates protect against it#

The standard defenses are running independent tracking parallel to the network's numbers, comparing notes with other affiliates running the same offer, and watching for a pattern where approval rates drop right as spend increases. Consistent, unexplained scrubbing is a common reason experienced affiliates blacklist a network and move volume elsewhere, similar to how validating whether an affiliate offer actually converts protects against wasting spend on a dead offer in the first place. Watching EPC trends over time can also flag scrubbing indirectly: a sudden drop with no change in traffic quality is worth investigating.

None of this is visible from the ad creative alone, but understanding the affiliate economics behind an offer helps explain why some advertisers rotate creative constantly while others run the same ad for weeks. A transparency index shows which advertisers keep an offer's ads running over time, a rough signal that the economics, including payout reliability, may be working out for them. Research offers before committing spend with the native ad spy tool.

A note on chargebacks specifically#

Chargebacks deserve special mention because they can arrive weeks after a sale was originally approved and paid, clawing back commission the affiliate already earned and spent. This delayed-rejection pattern is different from same-day lead scrubbing, and it's one reason some affiliates prefer offers with a shorter, clearly stated chargeback window over ones where a sale can be reversed months later.