The Right Way To Check Your Affiliate Links: Manually And Automatically
If you work anywhere near the performance marketing business, you know just how many things can go wrong with affiliate offers and traffic.
From fake clicks and fraud to broken tracking links — you name it. The result is almost always the same — lost profit for you.
Some time ago, we’ve started our research and involved 36 affiliate networks to find out just how much inactive offers hurt their businesses. We have discovered that the share of inactive offers has almost no limit, and varies from below 10% and more than 40% (!) on some occasions.
What does an inactive offer or a broken tracking link mean for affiliate business?
Every party suffers from inactive offers: you waste resources and affiliate’s trust, publishers let their audiences down, and you all lose money.
First, affiliate managers misuse their time — adding an offer to your system, specifying targeting along with other significant details (and that’s more than 25 parameters). Now let’s take the previous chart and turn it into hours your manager spends on inactive offers per month.
Let’s assume that your managers work for 8 hours. If the share of inactive offers is 33%, then more than 2,5 hours a day they spend working on something that will never pay off — inactive offers. That’s around 2,5 days per month! The days that you pay for, by the way.
And then, there’s a whole story with lost trust when your publisher starts driving traffic to that offer. As the final user has less chance to get to the desired product, the CR might get quite disappointing.
Everyone gets frustrated; no one earns.
Can a situation like that be avoided? Sure thing.
All you need to do is start checking your tracking links.
Our research showed that as managers start to spend their work hours more productively (dealing with relevant offers only), networks can improve their monthly profit results without hiring new people.
But, mistakes have to happen, so that we could come up with a solution.
Inactive offers with broken redirects are so common in affiliate marketing that every contributor, be it an affiliate, advertiser or manager, has their fair share of them. That’s why it was so crucial for us to address the needs of all participants, healing one of the most significant pains in the industry.
Manual Affiliate Links Checker
For those who work solo, we’ve created a freemium Manual Affiliate Links Checker. You can enjoy 25 completely free checks a day, or buy an unlimited plan.
Once you press the “Check” button, you need to give it a few seconds to “boil” and then you will see the chain of redirects.
And even the most detailed report on each link of the chain.
API Affiliate Links Checker
For partners with a bulkier volume of offers, we’re offering an API version of our solution. It shares the advantages of a Manual option plus some more profound features.
Blacklist
Have you ever noticed that your so-called partner decided to resell your offers back to you? It’s nasty, but it happens. The industry grows, and the only way to protect your business is to become more aware of the situation.
API Blacklist can help you discover any domain that hides within redirect chains. With our solution, all you need to do is add a domain you’re looking for to the list, and it will notify you once it appears in one of the offers.
You can use it as a tool to find resellers, or make sure you don’t work with specific domains.
API Blacklist helps you choose your partners in a more informed, smart way.
Express check
Express check helps you scan up to 2000 offers in less than 60 seconds. Although we see Checker as more of a marathon runner, working continuously, testing your offers time and time again, we know that sometimes you need to speed up. Hence, express check. Have a partner who needs a “yes” or a “no” right now? Great, we can check their offers for you real quick to help you make the right choice.
No more delays or extra waiting.
We are proud of our API solution and are proposing a free Test-Drive. Send your requests, see the results, experience the benefits — if you can say “no” after that, we’ll be shocked.
Inbuilt
Now, the last, but not the least form of our Affiliate Links Checker is a Built-In component of the Performance Marketing Platform.
The solution is seamlessly integrated into the main interface. You can view the latest validation results right on the list of offers:
The legend is simple: green – the Checker met no serious obstacles and reached the final redirect; red – something went wrong.
For more, you need to press on the checks area.
Another click and you can view a more detailed data on a specific check.
Here you can see how it works with a direct offer with the only link being Google Play Market. But with a different offer, you will see a full list of redirects and details on each one, just like in Manual or API versions.
Auto Suspend
One of the great features our Built-In Affiliate Links Checker has is Auto Suspend. Setting up a new integration or managing the existing one, you can choose how many failed checks should happen for the offer to be suspended.
After the offer is suspended, you will be able to find it in the list of External (API).
Preliminary Check
To make sure your managers waste even less time on inactive offers, we came up with a Preliminary Check feature. Now you can verify any offer that you get before adding it to the offers list.
Now, there are two ways to validate these offers.
- If you received the link through messenger, email, etc. — choose “Link Checker” in the Offer section.
Set targeting parameters and paste the tracking link in question. Press “Check”.
- If one of your current partners sent you an offer through API, you need to go to the Offers section, choose External (API), find the offer you need to validate and press “Check”.
The results will be displayed in a similar way for both options, giving you the full details on the chain of redirects.
