Knowledge Base      


What does it mean if I have an endless redirect loop?


If you have an endless loop, you have a flaw in the logic you’ve used to set up or chain your links and rotators together. At some point, one of the links points back to an earlier link, creating an “endless loop” redirect situation.

An example would be if you had three rotators chained together via the “Last URL” On Finish setting, and you put the URL of the first rotator as the Last URL of the third.

If you do something like this, once a person has seen all the URLs in all three rotators, the system will have nowhere to send them, and the browser will be stuck in an endless loop – resulting in an error page.

If this happens, you’ll get an email alert, and you should work on debugging and fixing it ASAP because, ultimately, it means these clicks are being wasted.

Our system tries to detect and alert you to potential “endless loop” situations when you set up your links, and it gets smarter every day. Still, unfortunately, it’s impossible to programmatically detect every possible scenario that could result in an endless loop situation.

If this happens to you, you need to “start at the top” with whatever link or rotator URL you’re having the problem with, trace the “logic” and URL flow of whatever you’ve set up, and try to find the problem.

The biggest tip we can give you is repeatedly click on your tracking link or rotator link with the problem and note which pages you’re redirected to.

If you continue clicking the link that’s having the problem, you should eventually see a “redirect loop” error page, and you should be able to figure out where the problem is based on the last page you saw before the error.

If not—and everything seems perfectly normal to you—it’s a rare issue affecting only a few people based on their location and your specific settings, and you just haven’t duplicated the problem yet.

If it has to do with your geotargeting settings and you don’t test using a proxy that makes it appear as if you’re clicking from different countries, you may NEVER be able to reproduce the problem on your own.

In a case like this, we don’t recommend spending much time trying to figure it out unless you’re getting a lot of alerts. If you’re only getting one alert daily, it could happen to 1 out of 5,000 visitors, and it’s probably not worth spending much time on …

We understand that this can sometimes be tough to track down, but because it can be such a labor-intensive process, we ask that you try your very best and put the time in yourself to “debug” your links and rotators before asking us for help on this. Thanks!

 
Note: When debugging endless redirect loops, be sure also to check the global Error URL that you’ve entered into your User Settings under the Traffic tab. If your global Error URL points to a ClickMagick link rather than an external website, that could cause your endless loop.


Article 54 Last updated: 02/21/2023 8:23:22 AM
https://www.clickmagick.com/kb/?article=54