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I send 'em an email to inquire. So far that's never helped me get my sales, back, although once or twice a sponsor has been able to explain where the sales went. (I did have a case in which a bunch of my sales were coming from Google, and all went *poof* when the algorithm changed. Once the sponsor, who had better data than was being shared with affiliates, showed me the referral info, I understood what had transpired.)
If the email doesn't fix the problem (and it never has yet, but it's still good business) I yank most of my links, but I'll usually keep sending a tiny trickle of traffic. Months or years later, I may notice that my trickle is converting again, and then I'll start sending some more traffic.
I think "shaving" is probably the explanation of last resort. I had a program owner look me in the eye at Phoenix Forum and tell me that he was just as baffled as I was as to why my conversions went from 1:2000 to 1:24,000 on the same traffic (those are ratios measured over weeks and months, not days). And I believed him, which I may not have done based on his emails. But he's still not getting my traffic back.
Most of my troubles like this, though, have been with semi-shitty programs that have lousy stats, poor back-end software, dubious billing, traffic leaks on their signup pages, and the like. It's been very rare for me to see that kind of fluctuation when I work with the pros. Unfortunately, in my niches there are only a few pros, and there's a lot of money to be made from the crappy little programs run by folks who don't know what they are doing.
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