Link Tester Use & Setup Guide
After you have created your wecantrack account and subscribed to our Medium Affiliate price plan or above, you will have access to our Link Tester. With this feature you will be able to:
- Find broken links
- Find out of stock products
- Automate link tests
- Get links reported to you that meet custom conditions
This will allow you to gain full transparency over which links are working fine and which ones you might want to replace, to ensure the best user experience possible to your visitors. The link tester does not only work for affiliate URLs but any URL, meaning you can also test destination pages and more.
Link Tester Activation
Once you have subscribed to the Medium Affiliate price plan or above you will have credits available which you can use to run link tests.
Requirements
- wecantrack account
- Subscription to Medium or higher
How to test links
- Go to Tools > Affiliate Link Tester > Tests
- Here you can insert links to test, either by copy pasting (limited to 250 URLs at once) or by importing CSV files containing the links you want to test (unlimited)
- The Label field provides you with the capability to add more information to the tested URL, e.g. a page URL where this link can be found or other definitions that might be helpful.
- If you want one or multiple links to be tested frequently, you can define the number of days the tester should wait until it will test the links again. If left empty it will test it once.
- With the Country selection field you can define from which country the link scraper should run the test.
- Once you have added your link(s) and set relevant conditions simply click on ‘Test’
- Our system will then test the provided URLs within some minutes. Once it is finished it will send an email to the account’s email address to report whether there were any errors. Moreover you can check the results in the interface.
Link Test Results
- Go to Tools > Affiliate Link Tester > Results
- On top you can find an overview of how many error (red), custom error (orange) and healthy (green) links were found. The grey bar represents links that could not be tested (e.g. due to captcha).
- By standard, the results section will show all links with an error status or custom error. URLs that passed with a 200 status and no custom error will not show unless you select ‘Include All’ in the status filter.
In the image below you can find definitions for the filters, buttons and columns. Simply click on the points to see the relevant definition:
Link Status Filter:
Through this selection field you can define which URLs should be showing in the results:
- Only include errors
- Healthy
- Custom Errors
- Failed
- Include all
- 200+
- 300+
- 400+
- 500+
Date Filter:
In the date filter you can select the links that were tested on a specific date.
Resolve:
By clicking on the resolve button, the selected rows will be permanently removed from the results.
Export Current Page:
With the export button you can export the
currently filtered links in CSV format,
so you can properly analyse your links in
Excel or Google Sheet.
This is especially helpful if you test hundreds or thousands of different links.
Get Test URLs:
By clicking this button the selected filters will be applied.
Status Code
The Status Code indicates what status the destination page had.
- 200: no error was reported
- 301 or 302: the landing page URL redirected
- 403: if the scraper was not able to properly test the URL it will state 401
- 404: the page is not available
Please consider that some websites still provide a status 200 even though there was an issue.
For some of these standard cases we have created custom rulesfor the most popular networks,
which is why they will still show as an error (see the Awin link at the bottom "Awin Error: Inactive Link")
Test Rule:
This column represents the name of the custom rule that triggered the error.
Custom Rule Applied:
This column represents the custom rule definition that triggered the error.
Custom Test Rules & Testing Out Of Stock
- Go to Tools > Affiliate Link Tester > Test Rules
- Here you can find all test rules you have already created.
- To add a new custom rule click on ‘+ New Test Rule’
- Give the new rule a name.
- Select a condition type, e.g. ‘Body Contains’ if you want to base the new rule on text defined on the landing pages content.
- Select the Operator, e.g. ‘contains’.
- Define the relevant value that should be checked for. For example “Product is currently not available”, if the advertiser defines out of stock products this way.
- Define for which URLs this rule should apply.
- Save the rule
Â
After defining a new rule our system will consider the rule for your new link tests.
Link Tester API: Automate Your Tests
POST: Â https://api.wecantrack.com/api/v1/test-urls
Authorization
An API key is required for each call. You can find your API key here. The API key can be sent in the query string: https://api.wecantrack.com/api/v1/test-urls?api_key=abcdef12345 or through the header X-API-Key: abcdef12345
Request
Header
Content-Type: application/json
Body Parameters
- labels
- urls
Body Example
{
"labels" : {
"label1": "global label 1",
"label2": "global label 2",
"label3": "global label 3",
"label4": "global label 4",
"label5": "global label 5"
},
"urls": [
{
"url": "https://www.bol.com/nl/nl/p/anti-diefstal-waterdichte-rugzak-inclusief-usb-oplaadstation-laptop-tas-t-m-17-inch-voor-dames-en-heren-schooltas-zwart-van-zedar/9300000087354929/?bltgh=tbu2cCJRbj0g-wZSYAVKoQ.3_10.11.ProductImage"
},
{
"url": "https://www.coolblue.nl/product/871765/blackvue-dr590x-2ch-full-hd-wifi-dashcam-32gb.html?cmt=c_a%2Ccid_21514012212%2Caid_168181845249%2Ctid_pla-334012751979%2Cgn_g%2Cd_c&utm_source=google&utm_medium=cpc&utm_content=shopping&gad_source=1&gclid=Cj0KCQjwrp-3BhDgARIsAEWJ6SyEK8PZioatBJ2KNz7eZqPU8axyxTrT0txPjCCZJ3QXC_WDJBob80UaAj3UEALw_wcB"
}
]
}
Response
Response Example
{
"success": true,
"message": "1 URLs have been queued for testing (out of 1)."
}