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When an affiliate offer stops: keep the traffic working

Offers stop, articles keep ranking. How to route offer clicks so a stopped offer never sends readers to a dead landing, and what to do when none is left.

Published
3 min read
3 min read
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A railway switch lever sending a cart from a blocked track onto an open one
On this page
  1. What breaks when links are direct
  2. Route clicks through one path
  3. When nothing is left
  4. Count the click either way
  5. How Grove does it

Offers stop all the time: the advertiser pauses a GEO, a cap fills, a program closes. An article that ranks does not know that. If its button links straight to the landing, every reader after the stop lands on a dead page or on traffic you are not paid for. The way to make articles outlive offers is to never link to an offer directly, and to decide where a click goes at the moment of the click.

With links written into the text, a stopped offer means:

  • readers land on an error or on a page that no longer pays;
  • someone has to find every article with that link, on every site, and edit it;
  • by the time it is done, a week of clicks is gone;
  • when the offer comes back, the edits are undone by hand.

On a portfolio of dozens of sites, this is a job nobody keeps up with.

A wooden water channel with a gate, water running out of its open end

Route clicks through one path

The pattern that solves it is a redirect path of your own between the article and the offer:

  1. The article links to your path, for example /go/<offer>, not to the landing.
  2. The path decides at the click. It looks at the visitor’s country, language and device, and picks a destination.
  3. Rules and splits. Rules filter by GEO, language and device; inside a rule, clicks are split between offers or landings by weight; the last rule catches everything else.
  4. Availability at the click. A stopped offer is skipped, and the click goes to the next split, then the next rule.

The article never changes. The routing does.

Two oil lanterns hanging on a thin wire

When nothing is left

Sometimes every offer for a topic is stopped. Then the honest thing is to stop selling: hide the offer button and let the article be what it is, an answer to a question. A reader who finds a useful page without a button is better for the site than one sent to a dead landing. When an offer comes back, the button returns.

An old tree with one cut branch and new shoots beside it

Count the click either way

A routed click is also the place to count it. Give every human click its own click_id and pass it to the offer, so the conversion that comes back by postback is tied to the site, the article and the offer. Without that, you know traffic, not which page earns.

How Grove does it

In DarkCore Grove each site has a Stream: rules by GEO, language and device, splits between offers by weight, or a form for offers that take a lead. Offer buttons go through Grove’s /go/ path. A stopped offer is skipped at the click and the visitor goes to the next split. When no target is left, the offer button disappears from the article, and the article stays. Every human click gets a click_id, and conversions come back by postback from any network or tracker.

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