Manager won't even look at it without proof — so what counts as proof

Had this exact thing in 2021 and handled it badly, so I want to handle it better this time.

Same offer - a straight email submit - running for eleven weeks. My tracker and their dashboard agreed inside two conversions a day for the first seven weeks. Week eight they stop agreeing. My side says 411 for the week, their side says 362. Week nine, 398 against 344. It has not closed since.

I opened a ticket and the manager came back with the usual - duplicate filtering, advertiser-side scrubbing, some leads failed validation. All plausible. All unfalsifiable from where I sit.

What I want to know is what an actual manager will accept as evidence. Last time I sent him a spreadsheet and he sent me a paragraph and that was the end of it. What do you send that makes the conversation continue instead of stop?

nothing you send makes it continue. you send it so that when you leave he knows why

A spreadsheet of daily totals is the wrong artefact and it's why the conversation died last time. Totals are exactly what he's already looking at, and he has an explanation for totals.

What moves a manager is a per-lead list with the things only you have. For each disputed conversion: your click id, the timestamp your pixel fired, the response code you got back, and the last four of whatever identifier the advertiser echoes. Then a second sheet with the ones that reconciled, from the same day, same source, same creative.

The point isn't the missing leads. It's the control group. If 40 leads from source A on Tuesday all landed and 40 from source A on Wednesday didn't, duplicate filtering doesn't explain it and he can't say it does without saying something checkable.

One more thing, and it is the part people skip: date every claim. "Since the 14th" is a fact he can go and look at. "Recently" is a feeling.

My own history with this is thin - I've had two disputes in four years and one of them I was wrong about. So weight it accordingly.

Before any of that. Did your tracker change in week eight? Version, redirect chain, anything. Answer that first or you're the one with the bug.

the control group idea is so obvious now you've said it. stealing this

Fair and I did check - nothing deployed between week six and week ten, no cert renewal, no DNS change. I keep a change log because of the 2021 thing.

The per-lead list is the bit I hadn't thought of. Building it tonight.

You will not prove shaving. I want to be clear about that before you spend a weekend on a spreadsheet.

In 2014 you could sometimes catch it, because half these outfits were running tracking platforms they'd bought a licence for and misconfigured, and you could see the seam. A mate of mine caught a network in 2015 by noticing the scrub only ever happened on leads after 6pm their time, which is when the person doing it was at his desk. That was a gift. Nobody hands you that any more.

What you can prove is a change. You can show that the relationship between your number and their number was stable for seven weeks and then wasn't, and that nothing on your side moved. That's not proof of theft, it's proof that something happened, and the burden of explaining it is theirs.

The useful outcome is almost never a payment. It's that the manager knows you measure, and manageable affiliates get shaved and measured ones get less shaved. That's the whole game and it always has been.

measured ones get less shaved. that's the only sentence anyone needs from this thread

Post the reconciled sheet too, not just the disputed one.

Reporting back because I said I would.

Sent the per-lead sheet with the control group. Manager replied in nine hours instead of four days, which told me something on its own. He credited 61 conversions across the two weeks - not the 103 I was short, but not nothing either - and blamed a "validation rule change on the advertiser side" that he said he hadn't been told about.

Might be true. Weeks eleven and twelve have reconciled to within four a day since.

So I got most of the way there and I still don't know what happened. Anyone had one of these actually end with an admission, or is 60% and a shrug the normal ceiling?