Attribution Discrepancy

Discrepancies arise when affiliate platform, operator platform and partner trackers count differently: timezone boundaries, dedup rules, filter differences, postback losses, definition gaps.

Managing the gap

Agree tolerance bands up front (±5% is a common commercial convention), designate the contractual system of record, and investigate systematic drift — random noise cancels; persistent one-directional gaps mean broken postbacks, filtered traffic or definitional mismatch. Reconciliation practice: monthly source-level comparison, logs as arbiter for disputes. Discrepancy handling maturity is a program-trust signal partners actively discuss with each other; being the program that investigates rather than stonewalls is cheap reputation.