A conversion in affiliate marketing is not a single event but a short story. A person submits a form, the network receives it, the call center phones them, the buyer confirms the order or changes their mind, and a week later the advertiser reconciles the data. At every stage the conversion's status can change, and with it the amount you will eventually get.
Why conversion statuses matter more than lead count
A beginner looks at lead count: «40 leads today, great day». An experienced media buyer looks at how many of them will turn into money. Forty leads at a 20% approval rate and twenty leads at 60% are different campaigns, and the second may well be more profitable.
Statuses answer three questions:
- How much money has already been earned: approved payouts.
- How much more may come in: conversions still pending.
- What is wrong with the traffic or the offer: the share of rejections and trash (how to assess the traffic itself is covered in traffic quality).
Without this split, any ROI calculation turns into guesswork. How to calculate payback properly is explained in how to calculate profit and ROI.
The main lead statuses: a cheat sheet
Networks name them differently, but the meaning is almost always the same.
| Status | What networks call it | What it means | Money |
|---|---|---|---|
| Lead | lead, new, created | The lead has arrived but has not been processed | No, just the fact |
| Hold | hold, pending, on hold | The advertiser is reviewing the conversion | Expected but not guaranteed |
| Approved | approved, confirmed, sale | The conversion is confirmed and the payout credited | Yes |
| Rejected | rejected, declined, refund, cancelled | A real person, but the order fell through or was reversed | No |
| Trash | trash, fraud, invalid, duplicate | The lead is unusable: fake data, duplicate, bot | No |
Lead
The earliest status: the form is submitted and the network has the data. On pay-per-lead (CPL) offers a lead may become billable right away, but more often it is just the start. In e-commerce and nutra a lead is followed by a call from an operator.
Hold
Hold (or pending) is the period while the advertiser checks quality. Every offer has its own hold period, spelled out in its terms. The key point: money on hold is expected, not received, revenue. If you plan next week's budget from the amount on hold, you can easily end up in the red after reconciliation.
Approved
Approved means confirmed. Only approved conversions turn into payouts. The approval rate (approve rate) is the share of approved conversions out of all of them. It is one of an offer's key characteristics; more on that in how to choose an offer.
Rejected
The person was real but did not buy: they did not pick up, cancelled the order or returned the product. A rejection after approval also happens, for instance on a return. A high rejection rate on normal traffic is a reason to talk to the network's manager about the call center or the offer terms.
Trash
Trash is a lead that could never have become a sale under any circumstances: a non-existent number, «aaaaa» in the name field, a repeat lead from the same person, a lead from a bot. Rising trash almost always means a problem on your side: there are bots in the traffic, the landing page form does not validate input, or one person submits the form several times.
How a status changes over time
A conversion rarely gets its final status right away. The typical path in e-commerce offers:
lead → hold → approved
↘ rejected
And sometimes:
lead → hold → approved → rejected (product returned)
The network reports every status change to the tracker with a new postback carrying the same transaction ID. The tracker finds the conversion it already has and updates it instead of creating a second one. If your postbacks are not set up yet, start with postback URL in affiliate marketing.
Tip. Make sure the network passes the transaction ID in the postback. Without it, the tracker cannot tell a status change on an old conversion from a new conversion, and one sale turns into two.
How statuses affect your metrics
Different statuses play different roles in calculations, and this is the source of most «discrepancies» between the tracker and the network dashboard.
| Metric | What to count |
|---|---|
| CR (conversion rate) | Usually all conversions, including leads and hold: it reflects how traffic responds |
| Revenue | Approved payouts only |
| On hold | Separately, as expected revenue |
| ROI and profit | Based on approved revenue |
| CPA when you pay per action | Only counted conversions; hold and rejected cost nothing |
| Approval rate | Approved / (approved + rejected), excluding those still on hold |
Note the last row. If you calculate the approval rate as «approved / all» while half the leads are still on hold, you get an understated figure and may shut down a good campaign for nothing. An honest approval rate is calculated on conversions that have already been decided. Other metrics are collected in affiliate marketing metrics.
Example: why ROI «jumps»
Say you spent $500 and got 50 leads at a $25 payout. Counting every lead, revenue is $1,250 and ROI looks great. A week later the network has approved 22 conversions, rejected 18, and 10 are still on hold. Approved revenue is $550 and ROI is about 10%. If the remaining 10 are approved, revenue grows to $800. This is not «the tracker counting wrong»; these are different statuses.
Conversion statuses in ArtisanClo
In ArtisanClo, statuses come from the affiliate network, an external tracker or your site and are recorded in the Conversions section. Five statuses are used: Lead, Sale, Hold, Rejected, Trash.
How network statuses are mapped
Affiliate network statuses are mapped automatically:
| What the network sent | How it is recorded |
|---|---|
approved |
Sale |
pending |
Hold |
refund |
Rejected |
fraud |
Trash |
| empty status | Lead |
| unknown status | Trash with zero revenue |
For your own network you can set a custom status mapping in the Receiving conversions section, if the network names statuses differently. There are about three hundred ready-made network templates; the full catalog is on the affiliate networks page.
What happens when a status changes
- A repeat message with the same transaction ID updates the record: that is how the network approves or reverses a lead. The status history is visible when you open the conversion by clicking its row.
- If no amount was sent, the lead or sale price from the offer settings in the flow is used. Currencies are converted to US dollars at the European Central Bank's daily rate.
- A repeat lead from the same visitor from a different click within the uniqueness window is recorded as «Trash» marked as a duplicate and does not replace the first one. The window is set in the flow, on the «Tracking» step.
Hold in reports
The Reports section has an «On hold» column: payouts the affiliate network is still reviewing. They are not included in revenue, so profit and ROI show money that has already been approved. Spend under the CPA model is also only charged on counted conversions: hold and rejected ones are not included.
Why the log and reports may not match
By default the conversion log selects records by received date, while reports attribute revenue to the click date. A lead from a click on the 30th that was approved on the 3rd lands in the new month in the log and in the old one in the report. Switch the log to «Click date» and the numbers will match; the choice is saved in the page URL and in the export.
Statuses also go back to the ad platform
If conversion sending is set up in the traffic source card, the platform receives its own click ID and the conversion status, sent once for every «conversion + status» pair. That way the platform's algorithms learn from real sales rather than from every lead indiscriminately. Details in sending conversions to ad platforms.
When to make a call on a campaign
Statuses arrive with a delay, while budget is spent every day. Hence the main practical question: when can you judge a campaign if half its conversions are still on hold?
- On traffic: right away. Lead CR, the share of bots and pre-lander CTR are visible in the first hours and days. If people are not submitting leads at all, there is no point waiting for approvals.
- On money: after the first reconciliation. Wait until the network has processed at least the first batch of leads, and calculate the approval rate on conversions already decided. It gives you a forecast for the rest.
- Projected ROI. Multiply the conversions on hold by the current approval rate and add the result to approved revenue. It is an estimate, not a fact, but it beats counting all of hold as money or ignoring it altogether.
- Track reversals separately. If approved conversions start turning into rejections en masse, the advertiser is unhappy with quality, and a reconciliation of the whole period may follow.
Tip. Make it a rule: do not scale a campaign until at least one status reconciliation has come in for it. A pretty lead CR without approvals scales risk, not profit.
How to raise the approval rate and cut trash
Some causes of a low approval rate are on the advertiser's side, but a lot depends on you.
- Filter bots before the landing page. A bot that fills out a form is guaranteed trash, and the network sees it as your low-quality traffic. How to do it is covered in how to filter bots out of ad traffic.
- Validate the form. A phone mask for the geo and length and format checks are simple measures that remove some junk before submission. If scripts are filling in your form, see how to protect a lead form from bots.
- Do not promise on the pre-lander what the offer does not have. Inflated expectations lead straight to a rejection on the call.
- Look at the approval rate by slice. Break conversions down by geo, device, placement or sub tag. Often one specific placement drags the approval rate down, and switching it off lifts the average.
- Watch for duplicates. If trash grows because of duplicates, check whether the form submits twice and whether the same people keep coming back from the ads.
Bottom line
Conversion statuses are the language the network uses to tell you how much you have really earned. A lead is the fact of a submission, hold is waiting, approved is money, rejected is a deal that fell through, trash is a lead that should never have existed. Calculate profit on approved payouts, keep hold on a separate line, compute the approval rate on decided conversions, and make sure the postback carries the transaction ID. Then your tracker's numbers will match your payouts, and your campaign decisions will rest on reality.
