<b>MYTH: "How did you hear about us?" surveys prove affiliates don't convert</b>

<b>MYTH: "How did you hear about us?" surveys prove affiliates don't convert</b>

Everyone says self-reported attribution surveys are the cookieless future. Then SaaS vendors use those same surveys to argue your affiliate channel is "only 4% of signups" and quietly cut your rate.

Reality: post-purchase surveys systematically under-credit affiliates. People remember the brand name and type "Google" or "a friend." They forget the review site that did the actual convincing three weeks earlier. The survey captures last-touch <i>memory</i>, not the research path.

So you get blamed twice: cookies die and undercount you, then the replacement metric undercounts you again because human recall favors the destination, not the trail.

If a vendor cites survey data to justify a commission cut, ask whether they're comparing it against their own pre-survey baseline. They usually aren't.

Verdict: the new attribution isn't more honest, it just fails you in a new direction.