Link Monitor

A broken affiliate link is broken income. The destination URL flips, the page returns a 404, the offer is pulled by the advertiser, the landing copy changes in a way that breaks the conversion path — and you find out about it when the dashboard goes quiet, not when the link first broke. By the time you investigate, you've spent days sending traffic that didn't convert and revenue you can't recover.

Routy's link monitor checks your tracking links on a schedule and alerts you the moment something changes. The checks run from multiple geographic locations (because some failures only happen in specific countries), at the cadence you set (every 15 minutes for the critical links, daily for the rest), and the alerts hit the channels your team actually watches.

After setting up monitoring, the following becomes available:

• Scheduled checks from every 15 minutes to once a day, configurable per link. The check cadence reflects how critical that link is to your business — a high-volume link driving 1000+ clicks an hour gets the 15-minute treatment; a long-tail evergreen link gets daily checks.
• Multi-geo testing so you catch the failures that only happen in specific countries. An offer that's pulled in Germany but live in the UK fails silently for German visitors unless you're actively testing from Germany. The monitor handles the geo-distributed checking so you don't run it yourself.
• Alerts via Slack, email, or in-app the second something breaks. The alert includes the link, the geo where the failure was detected, the HTTP status code or content-change signal that triggered it, and the timestamp. Enough detail to investigate immediately without first having to figure out which link is affected.
• Bulk monitoring across all your brand links. Set up monitoring once for a category of links, every link in that category is covered. New links inherit the monitoring policy of their category by default.
• Failure history per link, so you can see whether a particular destination has been flaky over time. A link that's failed three times this month is a different problem from one that failed once last week.

The monitor specifically catches the failure modes that conversion-watching doesn't catch fast enough: destination URL changes (the redirect chain points somewhere new), HTTP errors (404, 500, timeouts), and content changes on the landing page that indicate the offer has been pulled or significantly modified. By the time a conversion-graph-based alert would notice something is wrong, the monitor has already pinged you and you've redirected the traffic.

You pick a link from the brand-link or offer page in Routy, configure the check frequency, optionally pick the geographic locations the checks should run from, and save. Routy's monitor infrastructure starts checking the link in the background on the schedule you set.

Each check makes an HTTP request to the link (following redirects through the full chain), records the final HTTP status, the final destination URL, the response time, and a hash of the landing page content. The hash lets the monitor detect content changes between checks even when the HTTP status is still 200.

When a check fails — HTTP error, redirect to an unexpected destination, content change above a threshold — the monitor opens an Issue, fires the configured alert (Slack, email, in-app), and starts a tighter retry schedule to confirm the failure isn't transient. Transient failures (a single 500 that recovers on the next check) are noted but don't trigger alerts; persistent failures (multiple checks in a row failing) do.

Worth knowing:

• Geographic coverage spans the major regions (US East/West, EU, UK, APAC) with enough specificity to catch most jurisdiction-specific failures. For more granular geo testing (city-level), the monitor supports custom IP-based checks.
• The content-change detection uses content hashing rather than visual diff, so cosmetic changes (timestamps, dynamic counters) that don't affect the conversion path are tuned to be ignored.
• Throttling is built in — a noisy link that fails repeatedly within a short window only generates one alert, not one alert per failed check. The alert is followed up with a "resolved" notification once the link starts passing again.

The argument for link monitoring is mostly about how much revenue you've already lost to broken links you didn't know about. Most affiliate operations significantly underestimate this — the typical pattern is that broken links go unnoticed for somewhere between 12 and 72 hours, during which time the affected traffic produces clicks that don't convert. For a high-volume operation, the loss adds up quickly: a critical link broken for 24 hours on a campaign driving $5k a day in revenue is a $5k loss, and the recovery is just "the link starts working again" — you don't recover the lost day.

The monitor pays for itself the first time it catches a failure within minutes of it happening. For a mid-sized operation, that's usually within the first month of running it. After that, the monitor is silent until the next failure, which is exactly the right behaviour for a feature whose value is measured in problems you didn't have.

There's a strategic case too. The monitor data — which links break often, which advertisers have stable destinations vs constantly-changing ones — becomes useful in the commercial conversations with advertisers. A network whose links break consistently is producing operational cost on top of whatever commission it pays, and that's worth flagging in the renewal conversation.