A Black Friday deal ends on Monday. The post that promoted it and the newsletter that linked to it keep sending readers to that offer for months.
Most of them arrive after the deal is gone. They land on an expired page, or a full-price page, and they leave. You earned nothing, and the post now looks careless.
An end date fixes that. You can expire affiliate links automatically: the offer ends, and so does the redirect.
What the end date does
Every cloaked link in WB Ad Manager has an Expiration Date field. Open Links > All Links, edit a link, and you will find it with the other link options. Leave it empty and the link never expires, which is the default.
Set a date and time, and once that moment passes, the link stops redirecting. Nobody has to remember to switch it off.
Set the date to match the merchant’s own cutoff. Programs word their end times differently, so check the offer’s terms. Then reopen the link and confirm the stored time is what you meant, with a little margin if the exact hour matters.
What visitors see afterwards
This is the part to set up before the deal ends, because the default is not friendly. By default, an expired link returns a 404 page.
That is correct behaviour, and a poor experience. The reader came from a trusted post, clicked, and got an error page.
You choose what happens instead in Settings, under the WB Ad Manager menu, in the Link Cloaking section. The setting is called Inactive Link Action, and it has three options:
| Option | What happens to a late clicker |
|---|---|
| Show 404 page | They see your site’s 404 page (the default) |
| Redirect to homepage | They land on your home page |
| Redirect to custom URL | They land on the URL you enter in Inactive Link URL |
Pick the custom URL and point it at something that still earns: a deals page or a roundup of current offers. The fallback redirect is a temporary one.
One limit matters. This is a single setting for the whole site. Every inactive or expired cloaked link goes to the same place, so choose a fallback that makes sense for any of them. A general “current deals” page works. A page about one specific product does not.
A seasonal promo, start to finish
Here is the workflow for a promotion with a known end date.
- Create the link. In Links > All Links > Add New Link, paste the merchant’s promotional URL as the Destination URL and pick a clear slug, such as
hosting-bf-deal. - Set the Expiration Date to when the offer ends.
- Tick sponsored. It is not ticked for new links, and Google asks for it on affiliate links. Nofollow is on by default.
- Use the link everywhere. The post, the newsletter and the social shares can all point at the same
/go/address. - Set the fallback once. Pick the custom URL option and enter your current-deals page.
- After the date, tidy up. The old links still sit in your content. Remove them from the posts that matter most, or leave them to fall through to your fallback page.
That last step is why the fallback matters. Expiry stops the redirect, but it does not edit your posts.
Expire it, or change the destination
There are two ways to retire an offer, and they suit different cases.
Expiring is automatic and it needs no attention. The cost is that every expired link shares one fallback.
Editing the destination gives you control per link. Before the offer ends, you replace the promotional URL with the merchant’s evergreen page, or with a different offer. Every post that uses the link follows. The cost is that you have to do it.
For a promotion with a hard end date, we would set the expiry as a safety net and plan to edit the destination if there is a better evergreen offer to send traffic to. If the answer is no, let it expire.
Two things to know
Expired clicks are not counted. The click counter runs only when a link is active, so traffic that arrives after the date does not show up in the link’s total. If you want to see how much late traffic you get, the plugin fires a developer hook, wbam_inactive_link_accessed, each time someone requests an inactive link.
Expiry is part of the free plugin. You do not need Pro for it. What Pro adds around link management is listed on the free versus Pro page, and the link cloaking page covers the rest of what the free cloaker does.
For the full setup of branded links, start with switching to tracked, branded URLs. And whatever you promote, keep the disclosure next to the link: what to write and where it goes.