Attribution Disputes

At some point a partner will tell you they drove an install that your system did not credit to them. Sometimes they are right, the signal did not survive. Sometimes they are hopeful, and the install came from somewhere else. How you handle these decides whether partners trust your program.

Why disputes happen

Most disputes trace back to a broken signal, not a broken system. The merchant clicked on a phone and installed on a laptop, or used a direct App Store link that stripped the code, or installed weeks later after the cookie was gone. The partner did real work, and the attribution just could not see it. Treating the partner as wrong when the tracking simply failed is how you lose good partners.

Give partners a way to claim

The single best thing you can do is give partners a structured way to submit a claim: which store, roughly when, and why they believe they drove it. A claim you can review beats an angry email you have to reconstruct. It also creates a record, so a partner cannot claim the same install twice, and you can see if one partner is claiming everything.

How to decide a claim

• •Check whether the store is already credited to someone else with an exact signal. If so, the claim usually fails, and you can say why.
• •Look for supporting evidence: a click from that partner near the install date, the merchant naming them, content that lines up.
• •When it is a coin toss, lean toward the partner for a first, small, honest-seeming claim, and tighten up if a pattern of over-claiming appears.

Close the loop either way

Approve or reject, but always respond. A rejected claim with a clear reason keeps a partner engaged. A claim that vanishes into silence tells them the program is a black box. The goal is not to win every dispute, it is to be visibly fair.