Six signals that an affiliate programme is shaving your traffic

Shaving is the quiet tax of affiliate marketing. It is rarely deliberate fraud at board level; more often it is a broken postback, a deduplication rule nobody documented, or an attribution window shortened without notice.

The first signal is a conversion rate that drops on a fixed weekday. Genuine traffic quality varies smoothly; infrastructure problems cluster around deployment schedules.

The second is a growing gap between registrations and deposits that is not reflected in your own click data. If your click-to-registration ratio is stable but registration-to-deposit collapses, the loss is downstream of your tracking.

The remaining four signals — silent cookie window changes, retroactive chargeback adjustments, unexplained 'duplicate account' deductions and delayed month-end reconciliation — all appear in the Safe Mark audit checklist. Programmes that pass provide raw log exports on request.