Tracking Link Tester

Why a redirect chain can quietly cost you money

An affiliate tracking link almost never points straight at the offer. It passes through one or more redirects first: the click is recorded on your tracking domain, maybe handed to a network, maybe to the advertiser's own link shortener, before the visitor finally lands on the sales page. Each of those steps is a hop, and the whole sequence is the redirect chain. Every hop is a place where a click can be lost, slowed, or stripped of the data that makes it payable, and none of it is visible from the browser once the page has loaded. This tool follows the chain the way a real click would and shows you each hop.

Sub-IDs get dropped between hops

The sub-ID is how a conversion finds its way back to the right affiliate, campaign, and creative: a value like sub_id, aff_id, or s2 that rides along in the query string. The classic failure is a redirect that rebuilds the URL and forgets to carry those parameters forward, so the value present on the first hop is simply gone by the last one. The click still converts, but it converts unattributed, and the affiliate who earned it never gets paid. The parameter table above diffs the first hop against the final hop and marks anything that went missing.

An http:// downgrade is a lost commission

If any hop redirects from https:// to plain http://, the request can be stripped, downgraded, or blocked by a browser or network in between, and a postback that never arrives is a commission that never gets recorded. A secure link that silently drops to insecure mid-chain is one of the hardest problems to spot by eye, so the checker flags every downgrade explicitly.

Broken and endless chains

A hop that answers 404 or 500, or a chain that loops through more than ten redirects without ever landing, sends real visitors to a dead end. The tester marks the chain broken, shows you exactly which hop failed, and stops following a chain that tries to redirect somewhere it should not go. First-party tracking removes most of these hops in the first place, minting the click ID on a domain you own and carrying every sub-ID through automatically. See how LimeliJourney tracking works, or brush up on the terms in the affiliate metrics glossary.