Why Hold Periods Exist
They exist because the moment a conversion fires is not the moment the money is final.
A customer buys, and then has thirty days to return. A lead is submitted, and then a sales team has to call the number on it. A trial converts, and then a card gets declined on the first real charge. In every one of these the advertiser knows something on day 24 that nobody knew on day 1, and paying out on day 1 means clawing money back later from people who have already spent it.
Everflow's documentation states the design intent plainly: the hold period "should match how long you give customers to return items in your online store." That is the honest version. A hold period is a return window expressed as software.
How It Works on the Two Major Network Platforms
The mechanics are documented and they differ in ways worth knowing.
Affise treats Hold as a real conversion status alongside the others, with published numeric values: Approved is 1, Pending is 2, Declined is 3, Hold is 5. The hold window is set per offer, under Tracking and Control on the offer edit page. You do not pass status 5 in a postback; if the offer has a hold period, Affise applies it automatically.
Then the clock. Affise re-reads statuses "every 15 minutes", and when the window expires it "turns all Hold conversions into Approved ones." Their own worked example is a one-hour hold: a conversion arriving at 17:30 is approved at 18:30. Affiliate billing excludes anything still in Hold, so the money is genuinely parked, not merely labelled.
Two more Affise rules that matter. An admin can approve a held conversion early and it stays approved even though the window has not expired. And declining beats everything: "If the conversion has at least one reason for the system to register it as Declined, the system registers it as Declined."
Everflow is structurally similar and describes it more bluntly. On Hold, in their words, is "not a status" but "more of a label than anything", and on-hold conversions "are only nominally called Conversions since the sale hasn't been fully accounted for." The window can be set in seconds, minutes, hours, days or weeks, and the documentation says it "can range from as little as few seconds to several months or years."
The default is the part to memorise. On-hold conversions in Everflow "can only be manually rejected" and "are not automatically rejected after the holding period, they're automatically approved if no action is taken."
Approval by Timeout
Put the two together and you get the single most useful thing to understand about hold periods.
On both platforms, the normal path from held to approved is a clock expiring. Nobody reviews your conversion. Nobody signs anything. A timer runs out and a database row changes value. Rejection is the exception that requires a human, or an automated rule, to actively intervene.
A held conversion becomes approved when a clock expires; rejection is the only outcome that requires a human, and neither outcome is ever communicated to your ad platform.
That default cuts both ways and it is worth being fair about it. Approval by timeout means a busy affiliate manager who never opens the queue is not silently costing you money. It also means a hold period is only as protective as the review process behind it, which for a lot of programs is nobody.
Hold Period Versus Reversal
These are the two ways a conversion stops being worth what it said, and they are not interchangeable.
A hold period prevents. It stops a conversion becoming payable until a window closes. Everflow lists its advantages as partners never being paid if the conversion is rejected, no clawbacks, and no invoice reconciliation problems. Its limitation is that it must be configured before the conversion fires and cannot be applied to something already approved.
A reversal corrects. It un-approves something already approved, for a refund, a chargeback, a cancellation or fraud found later. Its cost is that the partner may already have been paid, so the money comes back as a deduction on an invoice, or a clawback if it has already gone out.
Everflow's own recommendation is a clean decision rule. If you can predict the verification timing, a seven-day trial or a thirty-day return window, use a hold. If the problem arrives unpredictably, months later, use a reversal.
Scrubbing Is a Different Thing
Affiliates use "scrubbing" for something adjacent, and the words get mixed up constantly, so it is worth separating them.
A hold period is a published, configured, symmetric delay. Everybody's conversions on that offer wait the same window for the same reason.
Scrubbing, in the sense the word is usually used, is a network selectively marking a share of an affiliate's conversions as declined without a per-conversion reason that survives inspection. That is not a documented feature on either platform, and I am not going to accuse any specific network of it in a glossary entry, because the honest position is that from the outside a scrubbed conversion and a legitimately declined one look identical.
That is exactly why the visibility settings in the next section matter more than the accusation does.
Who Controls Whether You Are Told
This is the part most affiliates do not know, and both vendors document it clearly.
On Affise, there is a field at Settings, Affiliates, General called "Conversion status in Affiliate panel's statistics". It is a multi-select of which statuses affiliates can see. The Hold documentation describes it as the way to "show or hide Hold conversions from affiliates in their panels."
Then the sentence that extends it past the dashboard, from the affiliate postback documentation: "The system sends affiliate postbacks for the conversion statuses selected in Settings > Affiliates > General > Conversion status in Affiliate panel's statistics."
The same selection governs both. A status the network has not selected is a status that never produces a server-to-server callback to your tracker either.
On Everflow, the control is called On Hold Partner Visibility, at Control Center, Platform Configurations, Global, and it has exactly three settings:
- Invisible. Partners cannot see on-hold conversions at all.
- Restricted. Partners see approved and on-hold conversions but not rejected ones.
- Visible. Partners see everything regardless of status.
Everflow also lets partners see Potential On Hold Revenue and Potential On Hold Payout on their dashboard, which is genuinely more than most platforms offer. And their documentation is candid that the reason a network might turn visibility down is support load: partners seeing pending status "may cause confusion."
Partners on Everflow can view conversion detail but cannot approve or reject. That is correct and I would not want it any other way. The point is not that affiliates should control the outcome. The point is that on both platforms, whether the affiliate is even informed of the outcome is a setting in somebody else's account.
What This Means for Your Own Tracking
Your tracker recorded a conversion on day 0. Meta, Google and TikTok were told on day 0. A conversion event sent to any of those platforms carries a value, a currency, an identifier and a timestamp. It does not carry a status, because the concept does not exist there.
So if 22% of those conversions are declined on day 24, three things stay wrong until somebody fixes them: your tracker's revenue figure, your reported ROAS, and, worst of the three, the training data the bidding algorithm is using to decide who to show your ads to tomorrow.
That last one is the expensive one. An unreversed decline is not a stale number, it is an instruction.
The Three Questions to Ask Your Affiliate Manager
None of this requires special access. It requires asking, and in my experience managers answer these without hesitation because none of them are secrets.
- What is the hold period on this offer, in days? It is a number in an offer setting. There is no reason not to tell you.
- Which conversion statuses is my account configured to see, and to receive postbacks for? On Affise this is one dropdown. On Everflow it is the Invisible, Restricted or Visible setting.
- When a conversion is declined after approval, do I get a postback, and what does it contain? This is the one that decides whether you can automate a correction or will be doing it by hand from a CSV.
If the answer to the second question is that you only receive approved conversions, you now know something precise: your tracker holds a permanently optimistic record, and every reconciliation you do will have to come from the network's reporting rather than your own.
So What Do You Do About It
Pull one month of conversions from your tracker and one month from the network's affiliate panel, and compare the counts by day. If they match, your postback configuration is passing status changes through and you are in good shape. If your tracker is consistently higher, the difference is the money you have been optimising on and were never paid.
Then close the loop in whichever direction you can. A tracker that can fire a reversal to Meta, Google and TikTok when a conversion is declined turns that reconciliation into a signal rather than a spreadsheet. ClickerVolt does that with a public reversal endpoint that pushes a Google Ads adjustment, a Meta refund event and a TikTok CancelOrder, and I will be straight that it currently expects the incoming notification to be worded as a refund or a chargeback rather than a decline, so a network status change needs mapping first.
Even if you never automate any of it, ask the three questions. Knowing the hold period on an offer changes how you read the first three weeks of a campaign, and that is free.
