Glossary

Hold (review period)

In affiliate marketing, a hold (or review period) is the time between a conversion being recorded and its payout being confirmed. The conversion sits pending while the advertiser or network validates it — screening for fraud, duplicates, cancellations, and failed verification — and only at the end of the hold is it approved and payable, or rejected.

How it works

A postback records the conversion instantly, but the money attached to it starts a review clock. Hold periods run from zero — simple flows auto-approve — through a few days, up to 30 or more where advertisers wait out chargeback windows or verify leads by phone. When the hold expires, each conversion flips to approved and counts toward the payable balance, or to rejected — the moment the approval rate is actually decided.

Hold and payment terms stack: a 14-day hold followed by net-15 terms means roughly a month between the conversion and the cash. Networks shorten holds or offer early payment to partners with proven quality — one of the main levers affiliates negotiate as volume grows. Platforms model this as a conversion lifecycle; in Affset, conversions land as pending and settle to approved or rejected when the hold expires or a manager reviews them.

Why it matters

The hold is a cash-flow gap: traffic is paid for daily, revenue arrives after hold plus payment terms, so a scaling campaign floats its entire spend in between. Buyers size budgets against that float and read per-source stats at hold expiry — pending numbers are provisional by definition. For a network, the hold is the risk buffer that absorbs chargebacks and fraud before money is paid out.

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