Questions to ask a link vendor

Most comparison pages list features. These questions find out whether the thing works where your traffic actually is.

6 August 2026 · PAD team

1. What happens when your link is tapped inside Instagram on an iPhone?

The single most useful question. A vendor who has dealt with this answers specifically, mentioning the escape and the fallback. A vendor who has not talks about redirects in general.

2. Can I see the failure rate per platform?

If they cannot report how many taps failed to reach the destination, they are not measuring the thing that matters and neither will you.

3. Where do campaign parameters get attached?

The answer must be the final store URL. Anything attached earlier can be dropped by an intermediate hop, and you will discover it a month later in an empty App Store Connect report.

4. What is the destination policy?

If arbitrary destinations are allowed without domain verification, the service is an open redirect and will eventually be blocked by platforms, taking your links with it.

5. What happens when a platform changes behaviour?

Every escape route here is undocumented. Ask what happened during the iOS 26 Facebook user agent change, and whether customers had to do anything.

6. Do I need an SDK?

For routing to the store, no. For opening a specific screen after install, yes and there is no way around it. Make sure you know which you are buying.

7. Can I test it before signing anything?

Create a link, post it to a story visible only to you, tap it from your phone. Any answer to questions one through five is worth less than that test.

The meta-question

Whether the vendor publishes numbers. Anyone can claim their links work. Very few publish measured failure rates per platform, because doing so means admitting the rate is not zero.