Q: We suspected the network was scrubbing us — how did we prove it cost 18% of payouts?

Q: We suspected the network was scrubbing us — how did we prove it cost 18% of payouts?

A: Scrubbing is when a network silently discards a slice of your conversions (sometimes legitimately for fraud, sometimes not). Proving it requires your own counting, not theirs.

Here's how one affiliate built the case. They placed a server-to-server postback on their own server in parallel to the network's tracking, logging every fired conversion pixel independently.

Over 30 days:
— Their independent log: 4,210 conversions
— Network's reported (paid) conversions: 3,452
— Gap: 758, or 18%

That 18% alone proves nothing — it could be genuine fraud the network caught. So they segmented: the gap was 4% on their email traffic but 39% on one push source. The push source was the actual problem; the email scrub was suspicious.

They took the data to their manager, dropped the push source, and the unexplained gap on email shrank to 5% after the conversation.

Short version: log conversions on your own server, then segment the gap by source — uneven scrubbing tells you where to look.

Still stuck? Drop your case in the comments.