Q: Our lead rejection rate jumped to 41% overnight — what did the advertiser actually find?

Q: Our lead rejection rate jumped to 41% overnight — what did the advertiser actually find?

A: We pulled one real case where a dating offer suddenly rejected 41% of leads (up from 9%). The advertiser shared the breakdown, which most won't, so use it as a template for what to ask.

The rejections clustered:
— 58% flagged as duplicate phone numbers (same number across multiple signups, hours apart)
— 23% had a session time under 4 seconds from landing to submit (humanly impossible to read the form)
— 19% came from a single hosting datacenter range

The affiliate hadn't gone gray — a sub-affiliate they'd added two weeks earlier was sending recycled data. Once that one sub-ID was cut, rejection dropped back to 11% within 48 hours.

Lesson: when rejection spikes, don't assume the whole funnel rotted. Ask the advertiser for rejection reasons by sub-ID. The bad traffic is almost always concentrated, not spread evenly.

Short version: ask for rejections broken out per sub-ID; the rot is usually one source, not your whole campaign.

Still stuck? Drop your case in the comments.