The standard, in full
What we accept,
and what we reject.
A lead is accepted when five things are true: the contact details are real and reachable, the enquiry was made knowingly by the person named, the consent evidence travels with it, it fits the brief it was sent on, and it is not a duplicate. AceLeads decides every lead within 48 hours, and every rejection quotes one code from a closed list of eleven, so you are always told which standard the lead missed and you can dispute it.
This is the policy, not a summary of it. Disputes are what kill affiliate programmes, and they start wherever a standard is left to judgement, so every rule below is written to be checkable by you: before you send a lead, and again after we decide one.
- Eleven reason codes, no twelfth
- Decision within 48 hours
- Every decision is disputable
- Your acceptance rate shown back to you
One lead, end to end
Receipt to decision, inside 48 hours
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Received and timestamped
Every submission gets a receipt carrying our timestamp. That timestamp is what the duplicate rule and the decision window both run on, and it is the artefact a dispute is settled with.
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Screened
Contact details are validated and the record passes the junk filter: placeholder names, disposable mailboxes, keyboard walks and impossible phone numbers.
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Matched against the brief
Geography, the qualifying criteria the brief publishes, the consent trail, and the duplicate window across every affiliate on the programme.
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Decided within 48 hours
Accepted, or rejected with exactly one code from the closed list. Either way it reaches you inside the window, and either way you can dispute it.
The universal minimum
Five things every lead has to be, whatever the brief.
Briefs differ on what they buy and where. They do not differ on these. A lead that clears all five and carries what its brief asks for is an accepted lead, and it is paid for whether or not the buyer at the other end closes it.
Contact details that work
A phone number that connects and an email address that exists. Both are checked before a decision, and the check is about the details being usable rather than the customer being available. A number that rings out, goes to voicemail or is not picked up three times is a working number, and it is never a rejection.
A genuine enquiry, made knowingly
The person filled the form in themselves, on a page you control, knowing they had asked about this thing and that somebody would be in touch about it. That rules out records typed on somebody else’s behalf, prize draw and free-gift entries, and anything harvested rather than submitted.
Consent evidence attached to the record
The form URL, the exact wording that was shown, the timestamp and the IP address, travelling with the lead rather than sitting in a system we cannot see. It is what makes the enquiry lawful for a buyer to work, and it is required on every brief without exception.
Inside the brief it was sent on
Each brief publishes the fields to send, the geography it covers and the qualifying detail that separates an enquiry it buys from one it does not. The brief is the standard. Nothing is judged against a general sense of quality, because a rejection you cannot act on is worth nothing to either of us.
Not a duplicate
Not one we already hold from you, and not one another affiliate reached us with first. Matching runs on the normalised phone number and the lower-cased email address, across the whole programme, for 90 days back from the moment we receive your submission.
A brief adds, it never subtracts. Each of the published briefs sets out the fields to send, the geography it covers and the qualifying detail that lifts a lead a tier. None of them can waive one of the five above, and none of them can invent a sixth.
Rejection codes
Eleven reasons. There is no twelfth.
Every rejection quotes exactly one of these, and the code you see is the code stored against the submission. A brief may narrow the list it draws on. Nothing can widen it: the eleven are enforced where the record is written rather than in a policy document somebody could edit, so a rejection carrying anything else cannot be saved in the first place.
duplicate Someone already sent us this person
The same person, on the same brief, already reached us inside the 90 day duplicate window. Matching runs on the normalised phone number and the lower-cased email address, and it runs across every affiliate on the programme rather than across your own submissions only.
How to avoid it. Normalise phone numbers and lower-case email addresses before you post, and never send an empty string for a field that might be matched on. Omit the key instead.
invalid_contact The details do not work
The phone number does not connect, or the email address does not exist. This is about the details being unusable. It is not about the customer being busy, hard to reach or slow to answer, and it never has been.
How to avoid it. Validate the number and the address at the point of capture rather than after the fact. A required field with no validation behind it is where most of these start.
unreachable_postcode We cannot place it on a map
The postcode is missing, partial or not a real UK postcode, on a brief that routes by area. Nobody can be sent to a job they cannot locate, so the lead has nowhere to go even though the person is real.
How to avoid it. Make the postcode a validated required field on any brief whose page names a geography. It is one field, and it is the cheapest fix on this list.
out_of_area Real postcode, wrong map
The postcode resolves, but it sits outside the geography the brief publishes. This one is as much ours as yours: if a brief keeps producing it, either the geography is drawn too tightly or your targeting is wider than the brief.
How to avoid it. Read the geography line before you point spend at a brief, and tell us if you are consistently landing just outside it. Some briefs widen when there is supply waiting on the other side of the line.
out_of_scope A genuine enquiry we do not buy
The person is real and so is the enquiry, but it is not the thing this brief buys. A tenant where the brief needs an owner, a domestic job on a commercial brief, or a requirement below a threshold the brief names.
How to avoid it. The qualifying question that separates in from out is written on every brief. Ask it on the form rather than hoping a free-text box covers it.
no_consent_evidence The evidence did not arrive
The consent fields were empty or absent: no form URL, no record of the wording shown, no timestamp, no IP address. The enquiry may well have been properly consented. We cannot show that it was, and nor could you if somebody asked.
How to avoid it. Send all four consent fields on every record rather than the ones you happen to have to hand. They are listed in full on the compliance page.
consent_failure The evidence arrived and does not carry
Something came through, but it does not do the job. Wording that names nobody and gestures at trusted partners, consent captured for a different purpose entirely, or a timestamp that predates the enquiry it is attached to.
How to avoid it. Use capture wording that names the recipient clearly. Consent cannot be applied backwards, so this is the one code on the list that cannot be fixed after collection.
suspected_fraud The record was not made by the person it names
Fabricated entries, incentivised entries from prize draws and free-gift promotions, records typed by somebody other than the enquirer, or a submission pattern no genuine form produces. This is the only code that can also reverse an acceptance later, and it is only ever used with evidence.
How to avoid it. Know where your traffic actually comes from. Fraud that reaches an affiliate almost always arrives through an unvetted sub-source rather than being generated by the affiliate.
brief_closed The brief was not open
The brief was paused or closed before your lead could be decided, and nothing was wrong with the lead. A closed brief normally refuses a submission at the door with a message rather than taking it and turning it down later. This code covers the narrow case where a brief closes between us receiving your lead and deciding it.
How to avoid it. Nothing to fix on the lead itself. Brief status is visible in your portal, and a planned closure is something we tell you about before it happens rather than after.
cap_reached The brief filled up
The brief carries a monthly volume cap and it was met before your lead was decided. As with a closed brief, a full one refuses at the door in almost every case, and this code covers the leads already in flight when the cap is hit.
How to avoid it. Nothing to fix on the lead. Caps and their reset date are in your portal, and a brief you are close to filling is worth a conversation rather than a surprise.
quality_hold A named hold on a source, not a verdict on the lead
The one judgement code, and it is deliberately narrow. It is used where a source shows a pattern we are actively checking, and it names the source and the check. It is not a general opinion about quality, and it is not somewhere to put a lead we could not fit into one of the other ten.
How to avoid it. Ask which source and which check, and expect a straight answer. A hold nobody will explain is a rejection wearing a different hat, which is the exact thing this page exists to prevent.
Nine of the eleven are fixable at the point of capture, usually by adding or validating one field on a form. The other two, brief_closed and cap_reached, are about us rather than about your leads, which is why they appear separately in your reason mix. What an accepted lead is worth once it clears all of this is on the what we pay page.
Duplicates
The rule that causes the most suspicion, in full.
Duplicate is the one rejection you cannot verify from your side, because you cannot see anybody else’s inventory. So here are the mechanics: what is compared, how far back, who it is compared against, and which submission wins.
How the programme works- What is compared
- The phone number, normalised, and the email address, lower-cased, against the brief the lead was sent on. Nothing else. A shared surname, a shared household or a shared IP address is not a duplicate.
- How far back
- 90 days, counted back from the moment we receive your submission rather than from when you captured it. The same window applies on every brief, and a brief that needs a shorter one says so on its own page.
- Against whom
- Every affiliate on the programme, not only you. That is worth knowing before you buy a data set or work a channel somebody else is already working, and it is why an enquiry you have placed with another network often comes back to us as a duplicate.
- Which one wins
- The first one we received, on our receipt timestamp. Not the earliest capture date, not the more complete record, and not whoever raises it first. The later submission is the duplicate even when it is the better lead.
- Your own retries
- A double click, or a retry after a timeout, is the commonest duplicate of all and it is entirely avoidable. Send the same idempotency reference on a retry and it is treated as one lead arriving twice rather than as two leads.
- On any duplicate rejection
- You are told the date the matching record reached us. Somebody who cannot say what they matched cannot really say it is a duplicate, so we say it up front instead of on request.
The false positive nobody warns you about. If a field used for matching arrives as an empty string, it can collide with every other empty string in the table and genuine leads get refused in a batch. Omit a key you have no value for. Never post it blank.
Not a rejection
What we do not reject for, which matters just as much.
A closed list of reasons is only worth something if the things outside it are named too. Every item below has been used by somebody, somewhere, as a reason not to pay a lead generator. None of them is a reason here, and none of them quietly becomes one later.
Short names, single names, no surname
Bo, Li and Al are real people, and plenty of forms only ask for a first name. A name on its own is not evidence of anything.
Lower case, capitals throughout, odd spelling
A form filled in one-handed on a phone looks exactly like this. So does a name our spell-checker has never met. Neither is a quality signal.
A free email provider
Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo and iCloud addresses are what most of the UK uses, including most of the people buying the jobs behind these briefs.
A missing postcode where the brief does not need one
Postcode is required only on briefs that route buyers by area, and those briefs say so on the page. We do not fail a lead for a field the brief never asked for.
A customer who later goes quiet
Once we accept a lead, chasing it is our problem. Somebody who answered a form and then stopped answering the phone is ordinary, and it is not a fault in the lead you sent.
A buyer who fails to convert
Not on the list, and it never will be. Reaching back into a payment because somebody downstream did not close is the commonest way a programme quietly stops paying.
An awkward hour or an uneven volume pattern
Leads arriving at three in the morning, or twenty at once, are a reason to talk to you about the source. They are not a reason to reject anything.
A source you tested that turned out to be small
We would far rather see a channel tried and stopped than never tried at all. Nothing about testing counts against you anywhere in your record.
There is no hidden scoring model behind any of this, and no quality score that quietly moves what a lead is worth. A lead is accepted or it is not, at the tier its brief publishes, and the tiers are set out on the what we pay page.
Automated screening
The junk filter, described honestly.
Every submission passes an automated check before a person sees it. It exists because a fabricated record satisfies commercial criteria exactly as easily as a real enquiry does, and one obvious fake reaching a buyer undoes a lot of goodwill. Here is precisely what it looks for.
Placeholder names and addresses
Words no genuine enquiry contains: test, testing, dummy, fake, sample, unknown, firstname, yourname, John Doe. The same short word given twice as a first and last name. A name with fewer than two letters in it.
Disposable mailboxes
Throwaway providers whose addresses are built to stop existing shortly after they are created, along with the domains set aside for testing. A real person’s free webmail address is a different thing entirely and is never touched.
Keyboard walks and letter runs
qwerty, asdfg, zxcvb, 12345, and the same letter three or more times in a row. This is what a required field gets filled with when somebody is trying to get past it.
Impossible phone numbers
A single digit repeated the whole way, a straight sequential run, and the well-known placeholder ranges. A merely wrong or mistyped number is not caught here, because binning a real customer is worse than passing on a bad number.
The bar is deliberately set too high. Every rule is one a genuine UK enquiry cannot trip, and anything merely odd is left alone. A real customer binned by a filter is invisible to everybody, including us, so we would rather let an unusual record through and judge it against the brief instead.
It does not judge whether a lead is any good. Clearing the filter is not acceptance, and a record that passes still has to meet the brief. A record that fails is rejected under invalid_contact, or under suspected_fraud where it reads as fabricated rather than mistyped, and a dispute will tell you which rule it tripped.
The window
When we can reject, and how you push back.
The decision window is the reason an acceptance can be final. All the verification happens while it is open, so nothing has to be reopened once it closes.
A lead can be rejected for 48 hours from the moment we receive it, and the clock runs on our receipt timestamp rather than on your capture time, so a lead you held back for a day does not lose any of its window. Inside it, the lead is accepted or it is rejected with one code. Outside it, none of the eleven can be applied to that lead any more.
After that, the only route back into an accepted lead is the closed reversal list of three: proven fraud, a proven duplicate, or a consent failure. Each needs evidence, each is disputable on the same route as any other decision, and the list does not grow. A buyer failing to convert is not on it and cannot be added to it.
If the window passes with no decision reaching you, the lead has not been rejected and nothing sits pending indefinitely. Tell us and it is decided the same working day. What has to be true about consent before any of this applies is set out on the compliance page.
Raise it
Reply to the decision notice, or open the submission in your portal and dispute it there. You have 30 days from the decision, and raising one costs you nothing.
Send the artefact, not the argument
The dialler log or recording showing the number connected. The consent record with its form URL and timestamp. On a duplicate, your own timestamped receipt. Disputes carrying evidence get upheld; disputes carrying annoyance do not.
Somebody else looks again
Acknowledged within one working day and decided within five, by a person who did not make the original call. The submission record, the receipt and the evidence you sent are all in front of them.
You get the outcome and the reasoning
Upheld, and the lead moves to accepted and joins the next payment run at the tier it qualifies for. Not upheld, and you get the evidence we relied on, including, on a duplicate, the date the matching record reached us.
Disputing costs you nothing and counts against you nowhere. It does not touch your acceptance rate, your caps or your standing, and there is no limit on how many you raise. A programme that treats appeals as friction is a programme relying on you not bothering. One thing to note: the contractual wording that governs decisions and reversals sits in the affiliate agreement, that agreement is a draft pending solicitor review, and where this page and the signed agreement ever differ it is the agreement that governs.
Your acceptance rate
A number you can recalculate yourself.
Most programmes will not tell a lead generator what share of their leads are being taken. Seeing it, broken down by the code that moved it, is the fastest way to find a channel that is quietly costing you money.
Apply to send us leads- The calculation
- Accepted leads divided by decided leads, where decided means accepted plus rejected. That is the whole formula, and there is nothing weighted hiding inside it.
- What is left out
- Anything still inside the decision window sits in neither half. A batch you sent this morning cannot pull the figure down before it has been judged, and it cannot flatter it either.
- Over what period
- Month to date by default, and over any range you choose. Nothing is smoothed, averaged across months, or carried forward from an earlier period.
- Broken down by
- Reason code and source, so a rate that moves arrives with the reason it moved.
brief_closedandcap_reachedshow separately, because that part of the number is ours rather than yours. - What it is not
- It is not a league table. Your portal holds no programme average and no comparison against another affiliate, because your rate is a property of your sources rather than a score we grade you on.
- If it drops
- We come to you with the code that is driving it before anything else happens. The point of showing you the number is that you can act on it early, and a conversation held too late defeats it entirely.
Non-negotiable
Two things every lead has to clear.
These apply to every brief on this page and every brief we run. They are not preferences, and a lead that misses either is rejected whatever else is right about it.
Your capture pages meet the standard
Every page you generate from has to be built to UK GDPR and PECR standards, not close to them. That means a real privacy notice, consent that is specific, informed and freely given, no pre-ticked boxes or bundled permissions, and AceLeads or a clearly described category of recipient named at the point of capture.
Consent evidence travels with the lead: the timestamp, the IP, the page URL and the exact wording the person was shown. Consent you cannot produce is consent you do not have.
What we require, in fullEvery lead is verified before it counts
Leads are verified on the way in, by you before you send and by us on receipt. Contact details are checked, duplicates are caught across every affiliate rather than just your own, and known junk patterns are filtered automatically.
This protects your earnings as much as our buyers. A verified stream gets a higher acceptance rate, and a clean sender gets the briefs with the best rates first.
How a lead is judgedWe audit capture pages, and we will ask to see one before your first lead is accepted. This is not box-ticking: under the Data (Use and Access) Act 2025 the maximum PECR penalty is a matter of public record, and a lead sourced from a bought list puts both of us in front of it.
FAQ
Acceptance and rejection, settled.
The questions that turn into arguments later if they are left open now. Ready to pick a vertical? Read the briefs.
What makes a good lead?
Working contact details, an enquiry the person made knowingly and recently, consent evidence attached to the record, everything the brief asks for, and no earlier copy of the same person anywhere on the programme. Those five are the universal minimum and they apply to every brief we publish. Each brief then adds its own qualifying detail, which is what lifts a lead from the raw tier to the qualified one, and that detail is written on the brief before you send anything.
Why was my lead rejected?
Because it missed exactly one of eleven published standards, and the notice names which one. The eleven are duplicate, invalid_contact, unreachable_postcode, out_of_area, out_of_scope, no_consent_evidence, consent_failure, suspected_fraud, brief_closed, cap_reached and quality_hold. Each is explained in plain English on this page, along with what to change at the point of capture so it does not happen again. Nothing outside the eleven can be recorded against a lead.
Can you reject a lead after you have accepted it?
No, other than for three things, and that list is closed: proven fraud, a proven duplicate, or a consent failure. Each has to be evidenced and each is disputable on the same route as any other decision. A buyer who fails to convert a lead is our problem, and it is not a reason to reach back into your payment. That is the whole point of deciding inside 48 hours: the verification happens while the window is open, which is what makes an acceptance final afterwards.
What counts as a duplicate, and whose submission wins?
A duplicate is the same person on the same brief inside 90 days, matched on the normalised phone number and the lower-cased email address. The window runs across every affiliate on the programme rather than across your own submissions, so an enquiry you have already placed with another network tends to come back to us as a duplicate. The first submission we received wins, judged on our receipt timestamp rather than on capture date or on who raises it first, and every submission carries that timestamp so you can check where you were in the queue.
Do you reject leads for having a Gmail address or only a first name?
No. Short names, single names, no surname, lower case, capitals throughout, unusual spellings and free email providers are all specifically not filtered, because real people do all of them constantly. Nor do we reject for a missing postcode on a brief that does not route by area, or for a customer who later stops answering the phone. The screening is built to catch records that cannot be genuine, not records that look untidy.
How do I dispute a rejection?
Reply to the decision notice, or dispute the submission from your portal, within 30 days of the decision. Send evidence rather than an argument: the dialler log showing the number connected, the consent record with its form URL and timestamp, or your timestamped receipt on a duplicate. We acknowledge within one working day and decide within five, and the person deciding is not the person who made the original call. If it is upheld, the lead moves to accepted and joins the next payment run.
How is my acceptance rate worked out?
Accepted leads divided by decided leads, where decided means accepted plus rejected. Anything still inside the decision window is left out of both halves, so a batch you sent this morning cannot drag the figure down before it has been judged. It runs month to date by default and over any range you pick, and it is broken down by reason code and by source so you can see which channel is moving it.
Does a rejected lead still belong to me?
Yes. A rejected lead stays yours, we make no claim on it, and it is never released to a buyer or placed anywhere. We keep the submission record itself, because that record is what a dispute is settled with and what proves the decision we made. You are free to place the lead elsewhere.
Test it on one lead
Standards are only worth what they do on a real submission.
Apply, take a brief, send a single lead, and hold the decision up against this page. Everything here is checkable inside 48 hours, which is exactly how long you should give us before deciding whether any of it is true.