Can someone explain to me on a technical level how a network could potentially "overtrack" leads?
I understand under-tracking is a common issue and it the mechanics of that make complete sense to me, but 'overtracking' just seems a little far-fetched and a way of leverage networks use to scrub. Please enlighten me, as it's getting a little tiresome hearing it, but not understanding how it's a possibility.
My only conclusion is - the advertiser fires off pixels to the network legitimately, they then scrub at the end of a certain period (week/month), the network then realises shit, we're short on xxx campaign's leads, the advertiser isn't crediting those to us - we must've 'overtracked'...
I've seen a lot of discrepancies between advertisers and networks. Most of the time networks make sure that they can bill off their own numbers, so you aren't left in awkward situations like you have now.
Either way if they "overtracked" that's their problem not yours. They should pay you, pause the offer, fix it, then get back to business.
Overtracking sounds like a terrible misnomer.
If they recorded more conversions than really occurred, that's inaccurate or misconfigured tracking.
It could be easy to mess up but like Green said it's not really your problem, particularly if you've sent traffic and continued to optimise because of it.
For some offers advertisers fire the pixel before they should by error ( for example SOI instead of DOI ).
However all you have to optimize are numbers you see on the aff network, so it's their responsibility to make sure they are correct.
One advertiser I work with directly sends me weekly lead reports with a certain number of "invalid" leads from duplicate IPs, fake email addresses etc that due to technical limitations on their end they can only detect after the pixel has already been fired.
This could be another reason that might lead to a discrepancy at the end of a billing cycle between aff network and advertiser, as long as the percentage isn't crazy high I think they should stomach it from their margin though.