Shave in affiliate marketing: What is it and how to avoid it?

Hello, everyone! Today we will talk about a not very pleasant thing that an arbitrator may face – a shave.

What is a shave?

Imagine the following situation: You have received an order confirmation from a customer. But then you see that your lead is marked as “canceled or unconfirmed”. The affiliate takes the money for the lead, and you sit there and don’t understand what just happened.

This is what a shave is. The advertiser or affiliate does not count conversions on purpose so as not to pay you “extra”.

This is mostly done by young advertisers and affiliates. Why: They want to save money on payments to arbitrageurs in order to increase their own income.

However, this practice is not widespread in CPA networks. Experienced arbitrageurs know how to recognize a shave, so usually affiliates who try to do this quickly fail. 

How can you recognize shaving?

Keep in mind one very important thing: tracking your statistics.

If you do encounter market cheats, you will notice the following:

• A sharp decrease in approves

Let’s say that recently your approval rate reached 80-90%, and now it has dropped to 30-40%. This can be a clear sign that you are being shaved. However, it is still worth checking other factors that may be causing it to drop. It may be that you have done something wrong yourself or, for example, you have simply changed creatives, targeting settings, etc.

• Difference between affiliate statistics and third-party tracking

If your third-party tracking statistics are higher than those provided by the affiliate, this is a clear warning sign. 

• Deterioration of traffic quality

You used to use your own traffic sources and everything was stable. As soon as you started working with an affiliate, you saw strong fluctuations. Here we advise you to check who you are working with. If you find that the conversions are unchanged, but the leads are many times less, it’s a 100% caveat.

• Offer performance has decreased

Offers are mostly launched in several CPA networks to attract more websites. In this case, there is a shave when you see that the conversion rate of the offer has decreased, but other CPAs are doing fine.

What are the ways of shaving?

There is intentional and unintentional shaving. How can you shave unintentionally, you might think. But you should also keep in mind that traffic is not always cut off due to fraud. Let’s take a closer look at this.

Intentional crawl is fraud

This is the case when you come across a dishonest affiliate. 

You are simply being shaved if:

• They do not register leads. The client is there, the affiliate has received money, and the arbitrator is sitting and waiting for the results of his work (they won’t be).
• The best way to defend yourself is to attack. Or the scammers accuse you of fraud. They simply reject your leads, saying that the traffic is suspicious.
• Attack number 2. They accuse you of not complying with the terms of the offer. 
• They cancel the conversion “because they wanted to”. They say that the client did not perform the targeted action, and reject the conversion. 
• Abruptly change the terms of the offer. For example, they quietly change the payment amount. And the affiliate marketer will find out about it when receives a surprise on the account that is slightly (or not) different from what was agreed upon earlier.

Unintentional traffic cutoff

As we’ve already mentioned, there are cases when traffic is cut off not because of fraud. Sometimes it can be your work, carelessness, or just technical failures.

There may be the following reasons:

• An error in the advertiser’s software.
• A certain browser extension blocks the call of the tracking code, and the person who performed the targeted action is not included in the statistics.
• Technical problems in the CPA network.
• Mismatch of the creative with the landing page. Users often do not stay on such ads. First, they see an exciting creative, click through, and then get disappointed after reading the real information.
• The presence of antiviruses. Very often, they simply cut off the affiliate ID in the link. As a result, the user interacted with the ad, but the conversion was not credited to you. 
• The arbitrager violates the terms of the affiliate program. This also does not happen intentionally. It’s just that inexperienced websites are sometimes inattentive when reading the terms of the offer, and then send traffic to the wrong place. In this case, the leads are simply canceled.

So how can you avoid a cheat in arbitrage?

Firstly, when working with new advertisers or affiliates, you should always check reviews about them on different platforms. As a rule, arbitrageurs do not let such scammers through, so if an affiliate is a fraud, you will find at least one negative comment. 

What to do if there are no reviews? In general, an affiliate that has no reviews is no longer credible. However, if you really want to try this cooperation, place a test order. This way, you will at least get an idea of what they are like.

Attention is everything. Check your statistics regularly and try to notice any changes in them. 

Use a third-party tracker to compare your statistics with those of the affiliate or advertiser.

Insist on checking leads that have suddenly canceled. Ask for access to call records. If they want to deceive you, they will not provide you with this information.

Try to use your own landing pages. It may not be the easiest thing to promote your own high-quality landing page. However, in this case, you will always be able to clearly understand what is involved. 

To summarize.

As you can see, we are not always 100% safe from shaving. It can occur both due to fraudulent goals of advertisers and affiliates, as well as due to your inattention or technical failures.

We hope that this article has helped you to better understand this topic, and you will now know how to avoid such troubles.