Scrubbing is when the advertiser declines some of the conversions you sent, so they drop out of your earnings. Some of it is legitimate: fake leads, duplicates, refunds. Some of it is the advertiser quietly trimming what it pays. Either way, the scrub rate is the gap between what your dashboard promised and what you get.
Scrub (or scrubbing) is affiliate jargon for conversions that were tracked but declined by the advertiser during or after the hold period, so they are never paid. The scrub rate is declined conversions divided by tracked conversions; its complement is the approval rate. Networks document the mechanism neutrally as validation: Awin, for example, describes each pending commission being approved or declined by the advertiser within the program’s validation period for reasons such as cancellation, return, failed payment or breach of terms. “Scrub” is what affiliates call the declined share, especially when it feels larger than it should.
Legitimate scrubbing removes conversions that do not meet the offer terms: duplicate leads from the same person, invalid or unreachable contact data, users outside the allowed GEO or age, refunded or charged-back sales, conversions from forbidden traffic types, and fraud (bots, incentivised sign-ups on non-incentive offers, click injection on installs). Lead-generation advertisers in particular validate aggressively, because the FTC and other regulators hold them responsible for how leads were collected.
Abusive scrubbing is the other kind: an advertiser declining a fixed percentage regardless of quality to lower its effective cost, or reclassifying good conversions as “low quality” with no evidence. It is hard to prove from the affiliate’s side, which is why reputable networks compare an advertiser’s approval rates across all affiliates and drop advertisers whose declines are not explained by quality. A sudden drop in approval rate on traffic that has not changed is the usual signal, and the account manager is the first call.
For an affiliate the scrub rate is a cost line, not a surprise. It is estimated from the historical approval rate per offer and per traffic source, applied to tracked conversions from day one, and reconciled when the hold ends. The spread between sources is the useful part: the same offer might scrub 5% of search traffic and 40% of pop traffic, which tells you where quality problems live before the advertiser tells you.
A lead offer pays 15 USD and the network shows an overall approval rate of 78% for your account. Splitting by traffic source changes the picture.
| Source | Tracked leads | Approved | Scrub rate | Cost | Approved revenue | Profit |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Native advertorial | 400 | 372 | 7% | 4,200 USD | 5,580 USD | +1,380 USD |
| Push | 500 | 420 | 16% | 4,500 USD | 6,300 USD | +1,800 USD |
| Pop | 300 | 144 | 52% | 2,400 USD | 2,160 USD | −240 USD |
The account-level 78% approval hides a source that is losing money because more than half of its leads are declined. Cutting pop raises the account approval rate to 88% and the profit by 240 USD at once, and it removes the batch most likely to get the whole account flagged. Scrub is almost never uniform; it clusters in the sources, placements and creatives that attract the wrong users. Numbers are illustrative.
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It depends on the vertical, flow and traffic. Verified-sale offers on search traffic may decline a few percent; SOI leads from pop traffic can lose a third or more. The useful number is the historical approval rate for your type of traffic on that offer, which the account manager can share.
Declining conversions that breach the offer terms is part of every affiliate agreement. Declining valid conversions to lower costs breaches the advertiser’s agreement with the network; proving it requires comparing approval rates across affiliates, which networks do.
Match creatives to the real offer, exclude incentive and low-intent sources, respect GEO, age and duplicate rules, pre-qualify with a prelander, and cut placements whose approval rate is far below the rest.
Yes, through the network, with evidence: click IDs, timestamps and the reason codes you received. Disputes work best for systematic issues (a tracking error, a wrongly applied duplicate rule) rather than individual leads.
References are listed as plain text on purpose; look them up by title and publisher. Updated: 2026-10-05.
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