Redirect chain

A redirect chain is what happens when a click passes through more than one redirect before reaching a page: a short link sends the visitor to an agency tracking address, which sends them to a landing page, which sends them to a country-specific version of itself. Each step is a separate request — a name lookup, a connection, an encrypted handshake and a round trip — and on a mobile network those add up long before the page begins to render.

Chains also lose things. Some clients do not carry the original referrer across hops, so the traffic arrives looking direct. Query parameters, including campaign tags, survive only if every hop copies them forward. Crawlers follow a limited number of hops and give up beyond it.

The rule is one hop where you can manage it: point the short link at the final address rather than at another redirector, and let the platform's own targeting replace the intermediate steps it was doing for you. A link checker shows the full chain with the status code of each hop, which is how you find the ones nobody meant to create.