My affiliate link redirects 5 times (302) before landing page loads

[hairycoo]

I've just plugged my aff links into a server header tool and I noticed that with 2 of the networks that I'm with, my aff link repeteadly redirects to another link up to 5 times before the actual page loads (the one which returns a 200 code). This looks like this:

my aff link -> 302 redirect -> link 1 -> 302 redirect -> link 2 -> 302 redirect -> link 3 -> 302 redirect -> link 4 -> 302 redirect -> merchant landing page (200 ok)

All the intermediate links are either network/merchant links (meaning they don't appear to have been hijacked in any way)

This seems excessive to me and it obviously adds extra loading time for the visitor so I'm wondering if it's something that would affect conversion rate. What is your experience with this?

Thanks

[hairycoo]

*Bump*

[SoharaDesign]

This looks like something you need to be bringing up with the Merchant themselves.

Looks like it could be 1 of 2 things:

Inefficient and lazy tagging - the merchant is bouncing you around pages to put your click through in various tracking source 'bins' instead of setting up links properly.

Site structure has changed a few times, meaning that the merchant has a lot of 302 redirects set up to funnel old links to new pages. Again, a little lazy, but not altogether unacceptable. I'd recommend requesting updated links from your merchant.