Hold
A hold is the period during which an affiliate network withholds payout on a lead or deposit while it checks for fraud, chargebacks, and traffic quality. It's not an arbitrary delay — it's the advertiser's safeguard against paying for invalid conversions.
How a hold works
After a conversion fires, the lead sits in a pending status, and only once it clears review does the network mark it confirmed and pay out. Hold length varies a lot by vertical and network — anywhere from a few days to a couple of weeks — and it's always worth checking the offer terms rather than assuming a default.
How hold affects a buyer's operations
While conversions sit in hold, that revenue isn't in hand yet, but ad spend keeps going out — which creates a cash gap under aggressive scaling. APEX's postback and S2S integration, such as Keitaro-to-FB-CAPI, lets buyers separate raw conversions from ones confirmed after hold, so ad optimization isn't based on data that might still fail review.
FAQ
- Why do networks hold payouts at all?
- To filter out fraud, duplicates, and chargebacks before money actually moves to the buyer. Without a hold, networks would be paying for invalid traffic too, which would make offers worse for everyone.
- How does hold affect a buyer's cash flow?
- Ad spend goes out daily, but conversion payouts only land after the hold clears, so buyers need budget reserves to cover that whole window. Scaling too aggressively without accounting for hold is a common reason buyers run short on spend.
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