The loss of revenue an advertiser experiences when commission is paid on sales that should not have been credited to a publisher, such as duplicate tracking, brand-bidding, coupon poaching, or ad hijacking. Leakage reduces program profitability even though the underlying sales are real and would likely have occurred anyway.
An advertiser discovers that 15 percent of its commission payouts over a quarter went to a coupon site that only intercepted shoppers seconds before checkout, sales that would have happened regardless of the coupon code.
Most advertisers run a periodic affiliate program audit, comparing click timestamps against checkout timestamps, checking for brand-bid paid search ads, and reviewing which publishers are credited on orders that show no genuine assist. Network tracking data plus manual spot checks together tend to surface the biggest leakage sources.
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