Compliance
Six signals that an affiliate programme is shaving your traffic
Published 2026-07-14 · Updated 2026-08-14 · 6 min read · AffSafe Registry Desk
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.
The shaving detection checklist
- Conversion rate drops that cluster on a fixed weekday or after deployments
- A widening gap between clicks in your tracker and clicks the program reports
- First-time depositors reported later than the registrations that produced them
- Historical figures in the affiliate dashboard changing after month close
- Sudden improvement in reported quality metrics with no change in your traffic
- Postbacks that fire on registration but intermittently fail on deposit
What to do when the numbers do not reconcile
Raise it in writing, with dates and figures, and ask for a raw export rather than a dashboard screenshot. Genuine technical faults are usually acknowledged quickly because the operator can see the same gap in its own logs.
If the response is vague or slow, stop scaling immediately but keep the account live — closing it can forfeit lifetime revenue on players you already referred. Redirect new traffic to an alternative program while the dispute runs.
Report the discrepancy to the registry. Payment and reporting disputes contribute to a program's score, and a confirmed unresolved dispute suspends it from the rankings entirely.