Dynamic expiring download links

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I was just wondering if anyone has a method for serving up dynamic expiring download links. An example would be sending someone an email and on a thank you page would be a link to download something that expires. It would have to be dynamic because you wouldn’t want to set an overall ‘end’ date for a link. The reason I want to do this is to dissuade people from sharing the thank you page with the link on it.

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Hi Robert,

I know this is a feature of Deadline Funnel. There might be another solution, but I’m not aware of any off the top of my head.

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I’d use a third party tool as suggested by Brian.

Or you may be able to use Javascript to hide the download link:

The URLs from the email would need a date value appended (eg. ?date=10/07/2016) and the Javascript on the page itself using that value to determine whether to display the link or not.

You can use the %TODAY% personalisation tag in AC so that you don’t have to manually change it every time (eg. in an automation).

http://www.url.com?date=%TODAY%

Lawrence

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Thanks. I realized that Deadline funnel wouldn’t work for what i’m trying to do. I want to create a link on the page itself that expires yet is unique to that person, so I’m not even sure if that is possible. The reason for this is because I tried linking directly to a file in the email and then if “someone clicked a link” trigger an automation to add a tag however I ran into issues where people were clicking the link but the automation was never firing. My work around was to send people to a landing page that had the tracking code on it and the link to download, then the automation was “if visited page”. I want to prevent people from just sharing that page which has the open download link directly on it. Any ideas?

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5

Hi,

The automation should work how you described it.

For avoiding folk to share the link, unless there is a service that allows you to build this out, you can develop a function that relies on the link from the AC email featuring values specific to the user like this:

http://www.url.com?user=name@domain.com&date=10/07/2016

This page would ‘read’ those parameters and quickly re-direct to the content page, where your link would be displayed or not depending on the date.

This content page not be sharable, so only work from a URL like the one above.

Again, not fool proof but potentially good enough?

A more robust function would need to plug into AC via APIs and have other checks in place.

Id does involve some dev work, though.

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Thanks for your reply. I’ve been told that the automation described should work and it has … but there it definitely failed a handful of times and I even put in a support ticket about it. Basically there were people who claimed up and down that they clicked the link which was mean’t to automate the next email with the link but they a) never got the next email and b) never showed as having “clicked link” in their site tracking history, so go figure.

It may be too ambitious at this time to build something out as I’m describing.

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Quick question…

Using the http://www.url.com?date=%TODAY% tag in my emails… is it based on the date the email is sent or based on when the subscriber clicks on the link??