Clicks but no conversions: a step-by-step troubleshooting checklist

Clicks are flowing in your Clicks report, but conversions are not appearing. It is one of the more alarming things to see in an affiliate program, and almost always one of the more fixable. The trick is to work through it in order, because each step rules out one failure point — from "the pixel never fired" to "it fired perfectly and landed somewhere you were not looking."

1. Check the pixel log first

Open your pixel log and filter to the window when conversions should have fired. This single move splits the whole problem in two. No rows at all means the pixel or postback never reached your tracking domain — an installation problem, so continue below. Rows exist means the attempt arrived, and its disposition already tells you what happened to it — jump to reading the disposition.

2. Is the pixel installed, and on the right page?

The conversion pixel belongs on the confirmation or thank-you page — the page a customer only reaches after converting. On the landing page it would fire on every visit; missing entirely, it never fires. Copy the snippet from the platform rather than hand-writing a URL, since a wrong domain or a typo goes silently nowhere, and confirm the pixel points at your own tracking domain. For server-to-server postbacks, check your outbound logs to be sure your server actually sends the request. The fastest self-diagnosis there: a POST, or a GET with format=json, returns a status you can read right in your logs — if it says the account could not be resolved, you are firing at the wrong domain.

3. Is the click ID reaching the pixel?

When a visitor lands from a tracking link, the URL carries the click ID (ll_cid). That value should be captured and passed to the pixel on the confirmation page; if your funnel spans several pages, carry it through with a session or hidden field.

There is a safety net. If the pixel fires without a click ID, the tracker falls back to the ll_cid cookie set at click time and credits the last click, as long as it is inside the offer's attribution window — 30 days by default, extendable to 90 or 365. The cookie can be withheld by some browsers on shared subdomains and never crosses accounts, so explicit passthrough is still the most reliable path. A pixel that matches no click at all, and carries no affiliate ID, records an unattributed conversion: kept for the record but excluded from counts and never paid.

4. Read the disposition

In the pixel log, each row's disposition names the outcome. converted worked — if you still cannot see it, keep going. unattributed means no click matched; fix the click-ID passthrough, extend the window if conversions arrive late, or send an affiliate ID on server pixels. click_not_found means the click ID did not match a recorded click, usually a placeholder or a truncated value. duplicate means a re-fire or a matched dedup rule, which is normal unless these should have been different conversions. cap_rejected means a conversion cap with Redirect behavior dropped it — raise the limit or switch to Continue. test_mode means the fire carried a test flag and was kept out of live reports.

5. Rule out the ordinary causes

Confirm the offer and campaign are still live — a paused campaign dries up clicks before conversions. Make sure no production traffic is accidentally flagged as a test. And check that you are looking in the right place: a wide date range, no affiliate filter, and a disposition filter set to show everything, since unattributed conversions have a blank affiliate and vanish from filtered views.

Still stuck? Book a demo and we will trace a conversion end to end with you on your own data.