View Poll Results: How often do you check your affiliate links to be sure they work?

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  • I check my affiliate links every day.

    2 8.33%
  • I check my affiliate links more than once a week.

    1 4.17%
  • I check my affiliate links once a week.

    2 8.33%
  • I check my affiliate links more than once a month.

    2 8.33%
  • I check my affiliate links once a month.

    8 33.33%
  • I check my affiliate links once a quarter or more.

    5 20.83%
  • I've checked my affiliate links within the past year.

    0 0%
  • I've checked my affiliate links but it has been more than a year.

    0 0%
  • I've never systematically checked my affiliate links.

    4 16.67%
Results 1 to 18 of 18
  1. #1
    MichaelCorfman's Avatar
    MichaelCorfman is offline GPWA Executive Director
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    Question How often do you check your affiliate links to be sure they work?

    Sometimes affiliate links break. A program might migrate to new software, or merge with another program, and the old links might not work anymore. Or a link might be for some sort of special offer that is no longer available, and the old link stops working. Or a program can go out of business.

    When affiliate links don't work properly, it is bad for business. It can cause a bad experience for visitors following the link, and certainly it hurts our bottom line if visitors we send to a site are not properly tracked back to us.

    All of these are good reasons for affiliates to periodically confirm that their affiliate links continue to work properly.

    So, for this week's poll, I ask how often you check to make sure there are not problems with your affiliate links.

    Besides voting in the poll, be sure to share how you go about checking links. Do you have an automated process that finds problems for you? Do you have links organized in a way that is each to check them? Be sure to also share how often you find problems, what issues do you see most often, an what you've learned to watch out for.

    Michael
    GPWA Executive Director, Casino City CEO, Friend to the Village Idiot
    Resources for Affiliates: iGamingDirectory.com, iGamingAffiliatePrograms.com, GamingMeets.com

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  3. #2
    MichaelCorfman's Avatar
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    For Casino City we run an automated process that checks every affiliate link we use. They are all stored in a database. If the automated process detects a problem with a link then we manually review the link and makes updates as necessary. There have been times in the past where we validated all of our affiliate links every day. Today we make sure we check them once a week.

    Michael
    GPWA Executive Director, Casino City CEO, Friend to the Village Idiot
    Resources for Affiliates: iGamingDirectory.com, iGamingAffiliatePrograms.com, GamingMeets.com

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  5. #3
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    Not enough.

    I had two times that a link was broken for some time. If anyone has an automatic solution, I am interested.

    I try not to use special landing pages. I do not see any advantage in it, and it is mainly this pages that are often outdated, broken, etc.
    Last edited by Triple7; 15 August 2018 at 3:31 pm.

  6. #4
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    I check mine once a month and use a tool, Rightlander to do it for me. It checks the links and the landing pages to see that they work or whether they have changed. I get alerts and can visually inspect the images to see what's changed, so know what to fix quickly.

    Biggest issue has been where the aff prog changes a landing page that's not appropriate for the traffic i'm sending. The link still works but i lose conversions because the page is no longer relevant.
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  8. #5
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    I have a small number of websites that I work on daily and at the same time, I check to see if my affiliate links are working or not. Just to be more on the safe side, I retrieve new affiliate links from my affiliate accounts and use them instead of the older ones already there. I also have great account managers who are always there to help out whenever I need them to sort anything out for me

  9. #6
    Triple7 is offline Private Member
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    Quote Originally Posted by nwalker View Post
    I check mine once a month and use a tool, Rightlander to do it for me. It checks the links and the landing pages to see that they work or whether they have changed. I get alerts and can visually inspect the images to see what's changed, so know what to fix quickly.

    Biggest issue has been where the aff prog changes a landing page that's not appropriate for the traffic i'm sending. The link still works but I lose conversions because the page is no longer relevant.
    Does that tool work well?

    When I check their website I see errors at both the FAQ page and when I enter the coupon code. That might have nothing to do with their tool, but it isn't a confidence booster.

  10. #7
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    I have a link checking program that alerts me if one of the links leads to a 404 page. Besides that, I manually click on links approx once every 3 months or so to make sure that they are functional.

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  12. #8
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    Quote Originally Posted by Triple7 View Post
    Does that tool work well?

    When I check their website I see errors at both the FAQ page and when I enter the coupon code. That might have nothing to do with their tool, but it isn't a confidence booster.
    Apparently they are currently in the middle of migrating the domain to .com. try www.rightlander.com/faq.php
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  14. #9
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    I manually check them at least once a month
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  16. #10
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    For SlotCatalog we check affiliate links once a month since they have so far rarely encountered broken links. But I think it will be better to start checking it once a week because every day we add some new affiliates.

  17. #11
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    I try to check them at least once a week.
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  19. #12
    baldidiot is online now Private Member
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    Quote Originally Posted by nwalker View Post
    Apparently they are currently in the middle of migrating the domain to .com. try www.rightlander.com/faq.php
    Is that anything to do with Ian? Sounds familiar to something he was talking about at the races a couple of years ago (Newmarket?).
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  20. #13
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    Quote Originally Posted by baldidiot View Post
    Is that anything to do with Ian? Sounds familiar to something he was talking about at the races a couple of years ago (Newmarket?).
    Yes it is, what's more he's added some Compliance modules, firstly for Operators and now for affiliates so they can get info on whether their sites are compliant with UK regs. AFAIK it's all bundled as part of the same service.
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  21. #14
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    This is a very interesting topic, for us I mean, because we had no systematical order to check our links (not only affiliate links, but links in general in the website), and last month I did a big check and found some surprises there!

    After that, I think like once per month for affiliate links and maybe one time every two months for links in general (if you have so) is a good start point to keep the website up to date.
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  22. #15
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    I should be checking them more often, I found some closed off links using new software.. but no email notifying me..


  23. #16
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    We test the front page links once a week. Other links are tested once a month.

  24. #17
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    Once per month.

  25. #18
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    I have a script written that checks all my links in a bulk on a button click, I use it once a month or so.
    Also in my links list I appended a button that checks a single link, which I use more often.

    Does it ever happen that links stop working because of some changes on a provider's side that affect our URLs?
    Anyone ever had such an issue? If so did you receive a proper notification?

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