What is affiliate scrubbing/shaving, and what do you know about it

Affiliate scrubbing is a situation where an advertiser (not the network) scrubs out bad leads and you do not get paid for them. This is happening on a majority of the advertiser pages. This could be as simple as scrubbing someone from another country when the advertiser is only asking for US-based leads or as complicated as the lead having bogus information such as a fake email address (e.g. abc@fakemail.com).

At another hand, Affiliate shaving is something when an affiliate network shaves lead from your leads. So maybe one in 100 of your leads does not get counted. The network still gets paid from the advertiser for this but you will never see anything. There are times when shaving is intentional (and some networks have been proven to shave) and sometimes when it is unintentional. Either way, it can be prevented by simply split testing the offer across multiple affiliate networks if possible.