Mistake: never reconciling your numbers against theirs

Mistake: never reconciling your numbers against theirs
Everyone takes the program dashboard as gospel. Tracking breaks silently — pixel misfires, redirect chains, sub-ID drops, cross-device loss — and undercounts you by 10-30% with zero error message. You just see a "slow month."

What goes uncaught:
— Your own click count vs. their reported clicks: a gap means lost tracking.
— Conversions you can verify (coupon redemptions, replies) that never showed in their panel.

Fix: keep your own click and lead logs. Monthly, reconcile yours vs. theirs. A persistent >10% shortfall is a tracking defect to escalate, not random variance. Test your own links from a clean device and a blocker-on browser quarterly.

Verdict: "the numbers are down" is sometimes a market shift and sometimes a broken pixel they'll never tell you about. Check which.