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The Deal With The Cursed "S Word" - Scrubbing/Shaving (2)

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There are two words that are almost a curse in the world of affiliate marketing, and they both mean the same - scrubbing and shaving.

Scrubbing and shaving refer to the act of reporting fewer conversions to the than the traffic actually produced. Most people’s first thought is that this is outright scamming and it’s a practice that should be stopped. There’s even advice that you should not work with anyone who scrubs. I have a less extreme view on it and will explain the factors I’ve found to be involved in the decision networks and advertisers have to make when it comes to scrubbing.

The first obvious reason to scrub is just pure greed. That’s the one most affiliates think is the only reason for scrubbing.

Let’s go into deeper thought and try to examine the whole picture.

TRAFFIC QUALITY

When your traffic quality is not up to par, and there’s no margin for the network/advertiser you will sometimes get scrubbed. Your conversion rate will drop a bit and nobody will mention a thing. Is this good or bad? Well, it mostly just is - you see a certain performance for the campaign and can try to make decisions based on the data. The alternative is a lot of work, hours put by all sides into optimizing traffic that is not so likely to be too different in quality throughout placements. To improve your lead quality, give this article by Matuloo a read https://stmforum.com/forum/showthrea...guide-for-2017!.

You should do what you can to max out the quality but always weigh in the effort needed to achieve it.

The scrubbing can happen either at the affiliate network side or on the advertiser’s side. You can have a situation where the affiliate network scrubs individual affiliates, the advertiser scrubs individual affiliates OR the advertiser scrubs the whole affiliate network. It’s hard, almost impossible to tell who does what, because nobody will admit to scrubbing.

MARKETING

Unfortunately, payouts are all the rage and affiliates need a certain payout to consider an offer. That means that promising higher payouts and then scrubbing can give either the affiliate network or the advertiser more takers for their offers.

It’s a situation similar to “The Prisoner’s Dilemma”



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t9Lo2fgxWHw

If nobody would do it and everyone would work together, you would have the true payouts. As soon as one company does it, they will force the others to also do it otherwise they lose. See the marketing example in the above linked video.

CAPS AND BUDGETS

Sometimes, there will be some fluctuations in caps and remaining budgets. These situations might call for some scrubbing by some of the sides capable of doing so.

Knowing now more of the possibilities, and the combination of them, you can hopefully see that a) scrubbing is happening to some extent just about always and b) it’s most often not with the malicious purpose of stealing from the affiliate.

Without scrubbing, payouts would be lower, and sometimes work would be harder. You should certainly still test and try to avoid being scrubbed too much but you should be at peace that everyone gets scrubbed in their affiliate career.

Most importantly in my view, this is something you have little control over and you should not make the grave mistake of blaming scrubbing for your lack of success. You are playing in one of the most meritocratic fields, everyone faces the same challenges, even the big boys so if you will do it better, you will see better results.

A very personal note: I do think it’s the fairest if nobody would scrub but the reality is that everyone will look for an edge. Knowing this, I assume everyone is a certain degree of selfish, so scrubbing will happen. I prefer to try to work with the dynamic of it happening than fighting for it to disappear. I am not encouraging it but I think it’s just one of those things that are part of the challenge and it’s not worth the effort fighting. In other words, your traffic quality and volume will deliver the level of scrubbing you get for the most part. The market will dictate how much your work/traffic is worth, one way or another. You will not fool the market in the long term.

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If I see higher payouts, compared to regular "market" payouts, all my alarm bells become active. Big chance they scrub indeed or the flow is bad so they compensate on higher payouts. I prefer low payouts/high CR's, most of time this is quite stable on the long run for both parties.

Scrubbing is the worst thing happening in AM, most of (newbie) networks use this aggresive method to gain new publishers with high payouts, rubbish!

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