Was it an email submit?
Give your AM a call and see what they can confirm

Most networks and product owners 'scrub' leads regularly.

Meaning a simple email submit should have a high conversion rate normally. Conversion rates for email submits would probably be as high as 50% if networks and the email submit owners weren't greedy.

So what usually happens is the owner of the email submit offer has a 'scrub' system in place where no matter what your conversion rate should be, the max they will credit you will be something like 10%. Meaning for every 10 people you send that convert, they will only credit you for 1 conversion.

The networks themselves can have their own scrub system setup so they make more money as well.

So you can see how quickly your profit margins can diminish on email submits because the two people you have to deal with to run the offer are greedy.

How can you bypass this and run email submits successfully?

1. Stay away from paid traffic and use free traffic only... Unless you know a few tricks on how to get insanely cheap paid traffic, running paid ads for email submits is a losing venture and a waste of time. The margins are already insanely low that running paid ads to an email submit is just asking for a loss.

2. Go direct to the email submit owner. If you by pass the affiliate networks entirely you might be able to work out a deal directly with the email submit owners so you can avoid going through 2 scrub filters. This might make the conversion rates good enough to sustain a paid advertising campaign, but the margins will still probably be too low to waste your time on, unless you are ok spending hundreds or thousands a day to make up for the low margins.

3. Avoid running email submits all together... Email submits are always the first thing new affiliates try... And its easy to see why... "get paid $1-2 for an email!? that's so easy!", but they soon find out that something is 'wrong' when they run the offer. They complain about low conversion rates and it doesn't make sense because email submits are the easiest thing to get conversions on yet you can't seem to get any... Well that's because email submits are a newbie trap.

And to play devils advocate here, I can understand the reason why the email submits owners lower conversion rates for their offers...

Email submits are prime targets for fraud affiliates. New affiliates like to use these offers to get their "friends" to sign up to them thinking they are going to make an easy $50 getting their friends to fill it out.. Or worse, signing up for the offer themselves multiple times. So the owners take that into account and come up with a conversion rate that is acceptable enough to be profitable on while taking into account all the fraud that goes on with these offers. They can't possibly afford to pay $1 for every email that gets put in since most of them are likely fake. So they have a system that determines what % of emails they will allow to pay out.

unfortunately for the legit affiliate, these conversion rates that they set are usually unprofitable for anyone who doesn't have a large constant stream of free or cheap traffic they can send to the offer.

So you're best bet is to avoid email submits all together.

It looks as if the lead didn't track for some reason. I would definitely speak to your affiliate manager at the network. Explain that the lead was submitted by someone you knew but that it was a legitimate lead and see if there is a reason for it being declined or whether there is a tracking issue.

I don't believe what RefuseToLose said above. We would never under-report on purpose, and I do not believe any of the networks that I work with, or have worked with in the past, on the merchant side, would ever do that either.

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Hi Guys, let's please get our terminology correct.

That's not "scrubbing", that is more accurately referred to as "skimming". Skimming is a form of fraud and in most places it is considered a crime. And, really, skimming is typically just taking a little off the top, what you guys are describing is outright scamming.

"Scrubbing", as described in this thread, is a term invented by scammers to make their skimming sound a bit more innocuous. It seems that some in the Affiliate Marketing game have borrowed the "scrubbing" term from a more legitimate practice commonly known as "data scrubbing" which removes duplicates or otherwise invalid data. In the situation described in this thread, it is simply used to mask outright theft under the mislabeled guise of "scrubbing".

I have heard many stories of Affiliate Networks that have gotten caught not counting all transactions, the typical response is "We'll look into it..." "Oh... our tracking script was broken... it's fixed now, go ahead and send more offers... you will get paid next time we promise (fingers-crossed) (wink)." They just keep stringing people along trying to squeeze every bit of money they can scam out of their victims. It's sad, really sad.

If you partner with crooks, you are going to get scammed, it's just a matter of time, and of how much.