Most affiliates blame the offer when conversions drop. Nine times out of ten, it's the plumbing.

Here's the failure pattern I see constantly:

1. Postback fires, but the sub-ID never arrives. Your tracker (Voluum, RedTrack, FunnelFlux) passes a click ID through the URL, but the network's postback template silently drops it if the parameter name doesn't match exactly. No error, no alert — the conversion just never attributes. You end up "optimizing" a campaign based on data that's missing 20-30% of real conversions.

2. Duplicate conversions from webhook retries. If your CRM (GHL, HubSpot) doesn't dedupe on a unique event ID, a single retried webhook can double-count a sale. Your dashboards look great. Your payout reconciliation doesn't.

3. Silent webhook failures. A 200 response doesn't mean your automation (Zapier/Make/n8n) actually processed the payload — it just means the endpoint received something. Always log the raw payload before your transform step, or you'll debug blind when a field renames upstream.

Quick fix you can do today: Add a raw-payload logging step (Sheet, Airtable, or just a dead-simple webhook.site bin) between your tracker and your CRM. If conversions in your tracker don't match rows in that log 1:1, you've found your leak.

I broke down the full postback → CRM wiring (with exact field mappings across Voluum/RedTrack/GHL/HubSpot) inside Affiliate Episode Insider if anyone wants the done-for-you version — but the dedupe/logging trick above alone will save most people real money this week.