What does it mean if I have an endless redirect loop?
It means you have a flaw in the logic you’ve used to set up and/or chain your links and/or rotators together, and you have an “endless loop” redirect situation.
An example would be if you had 3 rotators chained together via the “Last URL” On Finish setting, and you put the URL of the 1st rotator as the Last URL of the 3rd.
If you did something like this, once a person has seen all the URLs in all 3 rotators, the system will have nowhere to send them and the browser will be stuck in an endless loop—which will result 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, but unfortunately, it’s impossible to programmatically detect every possible scenario that could potentially result in an endless loop situation.
If this happens to you, you need to just “start at the top” with whatever link or rotator URL you’re having the problem with, and 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 to repeatedly click on your tracking link or rotator link that’s having 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—that means it’s a rare issue affecting only a few people based on their location, etc. and your specific settings and you just haven’t duplicated the problem yet.
In fact, 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 1 alert a day, it could be happening 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 try to “debug” your links and rotators before asking us for help on this. Thanks!
Note: When debugging endless redirect loops, be sure to also check the global Backup URL that you’ve entered into your User Profile under the Traffic tab. If your global Backup URL points to a ClickMagick link rather than to an external website, that could be the cause of your endless loop.