What Is Shaving, and How to Shave It Right

Xoxo, everyone — it’s Reznik, and today we’re going to talk about a rather delicate subject: shaving.

In the world of affiliate networks, shaving really is a delicate subject. Everyone shaves — that’s a fact. It’s hard to argue with. Shaving is a natural part of our lives: it brings us pleasure and doesn’t bother our partners, as long as they don’t know about it. But polite society just doesn’t talk about shaving out loud.

Read that opening paragraph without context, and you’d think we’re talking about masturbation. Yep, pretty much. Nope — the only thing the two have in common is how society treats them: every affiliate network does it in its youth, some never grow out of it even as adults, and none of them will ever admit it to you.

So What Exactly Is Shaving?

In the local jargon of affiliate networks, shaving is the process where an order the client already confirmed by phone gets cancelled inside the affiliate network. So from the affiliate’s point of view, their lead was cancelled for some perfectly ordinary reason. From the company’s point of view, though, the lead was approved and sent on for further processing. The affiliate keeps pouring traffic without a care in the world, and the advertiser ships the order without a hitch.

From the affiliate’s side, shaving always looks the same: the lead isn’t approved, and they don’t get paid for it. It can either cancel right away or sit stuck in “processing” for ages.

But from the company’s side, shaving actually comes in two flavors:

• Classic and open. Bare-faced, shameless nerve. Here the company itself just doesn’t pay for the lead and leaves the affiliate empty-handed.
• Hidden from the company. Here, the advertiser’s own call center has no idea that the order it just confirmed was actually declined behind the scenes. The company pays for the lead like nothing happened.

Not-so-honest advertisers love the first option. It lets them save both on the affiliate network’s fee and on the affiliate’s payout. The whole job of processing shaved leads then falls squarely on the company itself.

The second option is extremely convenient for the affiliate network and opens the door to a rather clever way of pumping up the rate. It’s carried out by automated mechanisms baked right into the network’s own software, invisible to any outside observer.

Why Shave at All?

First, it feels good. Second, it’s useful — even if the only side that actually feels the benefit is the one doing the shaving.

For advertisers, shaving cuts direct traffic costs. Sometimes an offer only turns a profit at all thanks to shaving and artificially depressing the approval rate.

The affiliate network has its own advantage from shaving — it lets you offer higher rates than your competitors by trimming the approval rate. Say you get ₽1,000 from the advertiser and pay the affiliate ₽1,000 too — but only for nine orders out of ten. With tricks like that, you can pay the affiliate even more than an honest advertiser would hand over, and still walk away in the black.

What Shaving Methods Are There?

There are several approaches to organizing the shaving process correctly:

1. Probabilistic shaving. With this approach, any lead can get shaved with a certain probability. Say, we shave 10% of approved leads. This approach gives the most even results and the lowest risk of getting caught. It’s perfect for pretty much any goal, especially bumping up the rate at the expense of the approval rate.
2. Anti-approval-guarantee. This approach is the exact opposite of that nasty, foul phenomenon known as the approval guarantee. The idea is that once a certain approval percentage is hit, every other confirmed lead gets sent to cancellation. That way the approval rate stays pinned at a level where the affiliate doesn’t run away screaming.
3. Cost-based shaving. This one’s for advertisers to use. If you see that some lead would be a straight-up loss under the standard payout scheme, but turns profitable the moment you skip paying the affiliate — off it goes into the shave. This comes in handy for, say, an expensive delivery out to Bumfuck Nowhere that the customer doesn’t want to cover.

And no, not every lead fits that last option! Sure, I get it — an advertiser would love nothing more than to never pay for traffic at all and slap “Cancelled” on every single incoming lead. Or at least half of them. But you can’t do that. Both affiliates and affiliate networks can run traffic on the exact same offer across several advertisers at once and compare the numbers. If it turns out your approval rate is sagging compared to everyone else’s — you’ll be left with no traffic at all.

How to Shave the Right Way

Elementary, my dear Watson! Shave in a way that doesn’t get you caught.

Nobody’s stopping you from inventing your own special approach to this tricky business. But whatever principle you use to pick which leads get shaved, there’s a set of rules you always need to follow:

1. Hide the comments. If a lead gets shaved, the call center’s comment on it can easily give you away — it might mention rescheduled calls and other little details. The less information the affiliate can see, the better.
2. Hide the call recordings. Do you hand your affiliates the actual call recordings? Congrats, you’re already a dumbass! Setting aside that in 99% of cases this violates the privacy of the phone call and leaks the customer’s personal data, you’re also digging your own grave — it rules out any chance of shaving at all.
3. Don’t cancel everything at once. Even once you’ve hit the approval level you need, never cancel the leads you’re planning to shave right away. Hold off on cancelling them for a couple of hours, and make sure to squeeze in a few approvals in between.
4. Give a realistic decline reason. If your network uses cancellation reasons for leads, or simply splits plain cancellations from trash, don’t dump every shaved lead into a single category. Stick to the average ratio for that offer. If real traffic gives you a couple of “changed my mind” and three “too expensive” for every ten cancellations, shaved leads should show the same picture.
5. Cancel orders with a bogus phone number. Is the affiliate sending you leads with numbers so mangled you’d need a psychic to make sense of them? Go ahead and cancel every one of those with “Incorrect number” as the reason — nobody can argue with that one.
6. Be careful with API traffic. If the affiliate is pushing you traffic via API, don’t cancel leads as “incorrect number” when there’s actually nothing wrong with the number. There’s a good chance the affiliate has their own copy of the leads saved and can check everything themselves.

How to Spot Shaving

Working as an affiliate, you’ve probably wondered: how do you tell whether the advertiser or the affiliate network is shaving? You can’t. They are. Guaranteed. Full stop. Just make peace with it.

That said, there are a few tips that’ll help you catch actual instances of shaving. They follow directly from the advice in the previous section. So, what should you watch for?

1. Comments got hidden from you. Suspicious. Ideally, you’d export the comment history on your leads and keep it on your own end. If you notice that a lead had a comment and it suddenly vanished — that’s a shave.
2. Call recordings got hidden from you. If some dumbass honest advertiser decided to boost your loyalty and trust by sharing call recordings, take advantage of it — check them, every time. If a lead’s recording suddenly isn’t there, or the count drops, something’s off — most likely it’s a shave.
3. Cancellations start piling up in a row. Working with a tracker, keep an eye on the status “feed” for your leads. If you spot a sudden shift in the ratio of cancellations to approvals on fresh leads — that’s a shave.
4. The decline reason is total nonsense. Are you absolutely sure you never put input masks on your landers’ phone fields, and yet leads keep getting cancelled as “Incorrect number”? Running a solid cloaker, and leads still get cancelled for “incorrect geo”? That’s a shave too, no question.
5. Test the advertiser. Place an order through your own affiliate link, using your own phone number, and confirm the lead when the operator calls. Did it get cancelled on the network’s end anyway? That’s not just a shave anymore — that’s shaving at its most shameless.
6. Keep your own copy of your leads. If you’re working via API, save both the leads themselves and their entire processing history. That lets you spot anomalies in your traffic.

Come to think of it, you could just grab AlterCPA and run your affiliate networks through it. That way you shield your traffic from unwanted outside snooping, and every single lead is right there in plain sight.

Enlightenment

Reading this article, some of you have probably just blurted out:

I get it now! Cancellations don’t actually exist! It’s all just shaving, all the way down the chain of affiliate networks to the advertiser, and by the advertiser itself!

Congratulations, you’re absolutely right, that’s exactly how it works! You’ve just cracked the biggest conspiracy in the entire affiliate network business. Go message your favorite CPA network’s support team right now and let them know you’re onto them!

And that’s it from Reznik — xoxo, everyone!