Your Redirect Chain Just Changed. Wouldn't You Like to Know About It?

If you run affiliate campaigns, you know the feeling. You check your stats after a few hours and notice your conversions have tanked. You click your own link. Tracker loads fine, network redirect works, but - wait. That's not the offer page you were sending traffic to. The advertiser rotated the offer, or the landing page is gone, or some hop in the chain is now pointing to a completely different destination.

You've been paying for traffic to a dead link. For hours. Maybe days.

WebMon now catches this automatically.

What Is Redirect Change Monitoring?

Every HTTP monitor in WebMon already captures the full redirect chain - every hop from your initial URL to the final destination. We've been storing this data since day one. What we weren't doing was comparing it between checks.

Now we do.

When you enable Alert on Redirect Chain Changes on any HTTP monitor, WebMon compares the redirect chain from each check against the previous one. If anything changes - a new hop appears, a URL is different, the chain gets shorter, or the final destination moves - you get an alert.

No more silently broken funnels. No more discovering three days later that your offer link now points to a "campaign paused" page.

Why This Matters for Affiliate Marketers

Affiliate marketing runs on redirect chains. A typical campaign flow looks something like:

Your tracking link (Voluum/Bemob/etc.)
  → Network click URL
    → Advertiser tracking
      → Final offer page

That's three or four hops, each controlled by a different party. Any one of them can change at any time:

• The advertiser rotates offers - Your traffic now goes to a different product, or worse, a "sorry, this offer is no longer available" page.
• The network changes tracking URLs - Happens during platform migrations or when switching tracking providers.
• Your tracker updates - A campaign edit, a rule change, or an expired domain in your redirect chain.
• An intermediate hop goes down - One server in the chain throws a 500, and the whole funnel breaks silently.

The common thread: none of these changes notify you. You only find out when your ROI craters and you start investigating.

How It Works

Setting it up takes about 10 seconds:

1. Go to any HTTP monitor's edit page
2. Toggle on Alert on Redirect Chain Changes
3. Optionally set an Expected Final URL - you'll be alerted if the final destination doesn't match

That's it. On the next check, WebMon establishes a baseline of your redirect chain. Every subsequent check compares against it.

What Triggers an Alert?

• The number of hops changes (a redirect was added or removed)
• Any URL in the chain is different from the previous check
• The final destination doesn't match your expected URL (if you set one)

Alerts go through your normal notification channels - email, Telegram, in-app - with a cooldown to avoid being spammed if a chain keeps toggling.

What You See in the Dashboard

The redirect chain card on your monitor detail page now shows:

• Change tracking status - Whether monitoring is enabled and when the last change was detected
• Recent changes - The last 5 checks where a redirect change was detected
• Expected URL match - Whether the current final destination matches your expected URL

You can also see the full current chain and compare it visually against what it was before.

Setting an Expected URL

This is particularly useful for affiliate campaigns. Set the expected URL to your offer page, and WebMon will alert you if the final destination ever stops matching - even if the intermediate hops change (which is usually fine).

For example, if your offer page is https://advertiser.com/offer/123, set that as the expected URL. You don't care if the network changes their tracking domain - you care if the user ends up somewhere other than the offer page.

Other Improvements

While building redirect change monitoring, we also shipped some quality-of-life improvements:

• WHOIS two-step lookups - Domain info now follows registrar server referrals for complete data. Previously some TLDs returned minimal registry-only data.
• Privacy-protected domains - WHOIS contact fields now show the actual privacy-redacted values (e.g., "Redacted for privacy") in a dimmed style instead of hiding them entirely.
• Subdomain handling - Monitoring staging.example.com now correctly looks up WHOIS for example.com.
• Keyword monitors - Now get automatic SSL and domain checks on first run, same as HTTP monitors.

What's Next

We're turning our attention to a few things the affiliate community has been asking about:

• More monitoring locations - Checking from multiple geographic regions to catch geo-targeted redirects
• Faster check intervals - Because 3 minutes feels like an eternity when you're spending $500/day on traffic
• Smarter alerting - Grouping related changes so you get one useful notification instead of five noisy ones

As always, if you've got opinions about what we should build next, we're listening. The best features come from people who actually use the tool every day.

Already monitoring your campaigns? Enable redirect change alerts on your existing monitors. New here? Sign up free and add your first campaign URL in under a minute.