Why Are My Affiliate Links Not Working? The 8 Real Causes

1. The merchant left the affiliate network

The single most common cause of dead affiliate links. Brands move between Awin, Impact, CJ, and Rakuten constantly, and they leave networks entirely. When that happens, your links keep redirecting — to a network error page ("advertiser not found", "this link is inactive") or sometimes to the merchant’s site without any attribution.

Networks never rewrite or fix your old links, and they rarely notify publishers proactively. The failure is silent by design: from the visitor’s perspective something loads, and from your dashboard’s perspective clicks just... slow down.

2. The product page is gone

Deep links point at specific product pages, and product pages die: items get discontinued, catalogs get restructured, seasonal pages get retired. Your tracking still fires at the network hop, so the click registers — then the visitor lands on a 404 or gets bounced to the homepage, and the conversion never happens.

This failure mode is nastier than a hard error because your click metrics look completely healthy. The only signals are a conversion-rate collapse and, if you look, the final landing page itself.

3. Tracking parameters were stripped

Affiliate attribution generally happens at the network’s redirect hop, which sets a cookie — but some programs (especially in-house ones using parameters like ref, aff_id, fpr, or rfsn on the merchant’s own domain) depend on the parameter surviving all the way to a page where a tracking script runs.

Merchant-side redirects — http to https, www normalization, locale detection, domain migrations — can silently drop query strings. The page loads perfectly. The commission never attributes. If you promote SaaS or direct-brand programs, this is probably your biggest invisible leak.

4. The offer or campaign expired

Networks like Impact and platforms like TUNE tie links to specific campaigns or offer IDs. When the campaign ends or the offer is versioned (offer_id 15 replaced by offer_id 42), old links return "this offer is no longer available" or redirect to a generic page with no payout mapping.

5. The link was mangled in transit

Copy-paste and CMS plugins break links in mundane ways: a stripped www that kills DNS on CJ’s tracking domains, double-encoded destination URLs on Skimlinks links, truncated tracking tokens, smart quotes replacing characters. The link was dead the moment it was published.

6. Homepage redirects (deep link decay)

Many stores respond to a dead product URL by redirecting to the homepage instead of returning a 404. Attribution may even survive — but homepage traffic converts at a fraction of product-page traffic. Industry measurements of affiliate link rot consistently find single-digit percentages of live links quietly decayed this way at any given time.

7. A shortener in the chain died

If your affiliate link is wrapped in bit.ly, a linktree, or your site’s /go/ redirect, each wrapper is another failure point. Deleted shortlinks, retired redirect plugins, and rate-limited shortener domains all kill the chain before the network hop ever fires.

8. The program switched networks

A merchant moving from ShareASale to Awin (an entire migration wave right now) or from CJ to Impact leaves your old links pointing at the old network. Sometimes they redirect for a grace period — without crediting you. The only fix is regenerating every link on the new network, which first requires finding every old link you’ve published.

How to diagnose a suspect link in 60 seconds

Work through the chain in order:

• ▸Click the link in an incognito window. Does it resolve at all? (DNS failure or browser error = mangled link or dead domain.)
• ▸Where do you land — the specific product page, the homepage, or a network error page?
• ▸Check the final URL for a click ID (awc=, irclickid=, tduid=, sscid=, cjevent=…). Present = tracking almost certainly fired.
• ▸Check your network dashboard for the test click within a few minutes.
• ▸If any step fails, regenerate the link from your network dashboard and republish.

The scale problem

Diagnosing one link is easy. The real problem is that you have hundreds or thousands of them across old videos and posts, any of which can die on any day, and no one will tell you. That’s the entire reason automated affiliate link monitoring exists: scan everything you’ve ever published, follow every redirect chain, check every destination, and alert you the day something breaks — instead of the month you notice the revenue dip.

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