You've got a single campaign link. It's in your email, your social posts, maybe printed on packaging. But the landing page you want to show someone in Germany is completely different from the one you'd show someone in the US. And the mobile experience? That should probably go to your app store listing, not your desktop homepage.
Most teams solve this the ugly way — they create five different links for five different audiences, then try to segment their distribution lists to match. It's tedious, error-prone, and falls apart the moment someone forwards a link to a colleague in another country.
Link routing rules fix this. One link, multiple destinations, with the routing logic handled automatically based on conditions you define. Here's how to actually set it up.
What Link Routing Rules Do — and What They Don't
A routing rule is a conditional redirect attached to a short link. When someone clicks, the system evaluates the visitor's context — their location, device type, language, or a random assignment — and sends them to the appropriate destination.
This is not the same as A/B testing in the traditional sense (though there's overlap, which we'll get to). Routing rules are deterministic for geo and device conditions: a visitor from France always goes to the French page. A/B splits are probabilistic — each visitor gets randomly assigned.
The key constraint to understand: routing rules are evaluated in order. The first matching rule wins. If no rules match, the visitor hits your default URL. This matters more than you'd think once you start layering conditions.
Setting Up Geo-Targeting Rules
Geo-targeting is probably the most common routing rule, and it's the one where mistakes cost you the most. Sending Japanese-speaking visitors to an English landing page doesn't just hurt conversion rates — it actively damages trust.
To set up geo-routing in Acturity:
- Create or edit a short link and open the routing rules panel
- Add a new rule and select "Location" as the condition type
- Choose your target — this can be a country, a region, or even a city
- Set the destination URL for that rule
- Repeat for each geography you want to handle
A few things worth noting. Country-level targeting is reliable — it works well for about 98% of clicks. City-level targeting is less precise because IP geolocation gets fuzzy at that granularity, especially on mobile networks. If you're running a campaign that targets "people in downtown Chicago," you might catch some visitors from the broader metro area too.
One pattern that works well for international campaigns: set your default URL to the English version of your page, then add country rules for each localized version. Germany → German page, Japan → Japanese page, Brazil → Portuguese page. Visitors from countries you haven't localized for still get a reasonable experience.
Don't go overboard, though. A SaaS team running 40 campaigns doesn't need routing rules on every single link. Use them where the destination genuinely differs — product pages with regional pricing, app downloads with region-locked stores, or events with timezone-specific registration pages.
Device-Based Routing
Device targeting solves a different problem. Sometimes the right destination depends on whether someone's on an iPhone, an Android phone, or a desktop browser.
The classic use case: app promotion links. You want iOS users to land on the App Store, Android users on Google Play, and desktop users on your marketing page (or a page with QR codes to download — which, honestly, most teams forget to set up). You can create QR codes that point to the same smart link, and the routing handles the rest.
Device rules in Acturity support these condition types:
- Operating system — iOS, Android, Windows, macOS, Linux
- Device type — mobile, tablet, desktop
- Browser — Chrome, Safari, Firefox, Edge, and others
You can combine these. A rule that targets "iOS AND mobile" would catch iPhones but not iPads, which is useful when your iPad experience differs from your phone experience.
Ordering matters here. If you have a broad "mobile" rule and a specific "iOS mobile" rule, put the iOS rule first. Otherwise the generic mobile rule catches iOS visitors before the specific rule gets evaluated.
Something teams often overlook: tablets. A tablet visitor hitting a mobile-optimized page can be a weird experience, and a desktop page on a tablet isn't great either. If your landing pages have a dedicated tablet layout, add a tablet rule. If they don't — and most don't — just let tablets fall through to your default URL and make sure that page is responsive.
A/B Split Routing
A/B splits through routing rules are different from full A/B testing with statistical analysis, though they're related. Think of split routing as the traffic distribution mechanism, and A/B testing as the measurement layer on top.
With split routing, you assign percentages to different destination URLs. A 50/50 split sends half your traffic to variant A and half to variant B. You can also do 70/30, 80/10/10, or any other distribution that adds up to 100%.
When to use split routing versus full A/B testing:
Split routing is enough when you're comparing completely different pages or funnels and you'll measure success through your own analytics (conversions in your CRM, sign-ups in your product, etc.). Full A/B testing adds click-level tracking, confidence intervals, and automatic winner selection — it's the better choice when you need statistical rigor and want everything measured within Acturity.
Setting up a split is straightforward. Add a routing rule, select "Split" as the condition type, define your variants with their percentages and destination URLs. The assignment is random per click — there's no user-level persistence by default, so someone clicking the same link twice might see different variants.
A practical tip: start with a 90/10 split when you're testing something risky, like a completely new landing page design. Send 90% of traffic to your proven page and 10% to the new one. If the new page doesn't tank, gradually increase. This feels slow, but it protects you from losing conversions during the test.
Layering Multiple Rules Together
This is where things get interesting — and where most people trip up the first time.
You can stack geo, device, and split rules on the same link. The rules evaluate top to bottom, and the first match wins. So the ordering becomes your logic flow.
Say you're promoting a mobile app globally. Your rule stack might look like:
- Country = Japan, OS = iOS → Japanese App Store listing
- Country = Japan, OS = Android → Japanese Google Play listing
- Country = Japan → Japanese marketing page (catches desktop)
- OS = iOS → English App Store listing
- OS = Android → English Google Play listing
- Default → English marketing page
Notice how the Japan-specific rules come first. If you put the generic iOS rule above the Japan + iOS rule, Japanese iPhone users would hit the English App Store listing instead of the Japanese one.
A less obvious pattern: you can use splits within a geo segment. Maybe you want to A/B test your German landing page but not your US one. Put the German split rules above the US rules. German visitors get split between variants, everyone else follows their normal routing.
The thing is, complexity has a cost. Every rule you add is a rule you need to maintain. If you change the German landing page URL, you need to remember to update it in your routing rules too. Keep your rule stacks as simple as you can get away with.
Monitoring What's Actually Happening
Setting up routing rules without monitoring them is like adjusting your car's mirrors and then driving with your eyes closed. You need to verify that traffic is flowing where you expect.
Acturity's analytics dashboard breaks down clicks by destination, so you can see exactly how many visitors went to each routing target. Check this within the first few hours of launching a routed link. Common issues to look for:
- One destination getting 0 clicks (probably a misconfigured rule that never matches)
- Your default URL getting way more traffic than expected (rules might be too narrow)
- Geographic distribution that doesn't match your audience (maybe your audience isn't where you thought it was)
If you're running a split test, check that the actual distribution matches your configured percentages. Small samples will show variance — a 50/50 split might show 60/40 in the first 100 clicks. That's normal. By 1,000 clicks it should converge.
For campaign-level visibility across multiple routed links, grouping links into campaigns makes it much easier to spot patterns. You can also build a tracking dashboard that gives your whole team visibility into what's working.
Common Mistakes and How to Avoid Them
After watching teams set up routing rules, a few mistakes come up repeatedly.
Forgetting the default URL. Every routed link needs a sensible fallback. If someone clicks from a country or device you didn't account for, the default is what they'll see. Don't leave it as a generic homepage if you can give them something better.
Over-segmenting. Having 30 routing rules on a single link is a sign that you're trying to solve a content problem with link routing. If you need that many variations, you probably need a localization strategy, not more rules.
Not testing from the target context. It's easy to set up a geo-rule for Brazil and never actually verify it works. Use a VPN or Acturity's rule preview to confirm each rule resolves to the right destination. This takes five minutes and saves you from sending an entire country's worth of traffic to a 404.
Ignoring rule order after the initial setup. When you add new rules later, they might land at the bottom of the stack where they'll never match because a broader rule above them catches the traffic first. Always review the full rule order when making changes.
FAQ
Can I use link routing rules with branded domains?
Yes. Routing rules work on any short link regardless of which custom domain it's on. Your visitors see your branded domain, and the routing happens invisibly on redirect. This is actually one of the strongest use cases for branded links — a clean, trustworthy URL that quietly handles complex routing behind the scenes.
Do routing rules slow down the redirect?
The additional latency is minimal — typically under 10 milliseconds. Geo lookups happen against a local database, not an external API call, so there's no network round-trip for location detection. Device detection is parsed from the User-Agent header, which is already present in the request. Your visitors won't notice any difference.
How do routing rules interact with UTM parameters?
UTM parameters on your short link are preserved through routing. If someone clicks act.link/promo?utm_source=email, the UTM parameters get passed through to whichever destination the routing rules select. You can also set different UTM parameters on each destination URL within your routing rules, which is useful for tracking which variant or geo segment drove a conversion.
Start Simple, Then Layer
Link routing is one of those features that's easy to start with and surprisingly deep once you get into it. Begin with a single geo-rule or device-rule on your next campaign link. Watch the analytics. See how traffic distributes.
Once you're comfortable with the basics, try layering conditions or adding a split test to an existing routed link. The Acturity dashboard shows you exactly where each click went, so you're never flying blind.
The real value of routing rules isn't any single redirect — it's the compounding effect of giving every visitor the most relevant destination, automatically, from a single link. That's less work for your team and a better experience for your audience. Hard to argue with both of those.
