Landing-page routing
Traffic routing rules by device, country, and weight
Conditions decide which audience a visitor belongs to, the default destination catches everyone else, and weights split traffic inside the matched rule.
Traffic routing rules by device and country work in three layers: conditions decide which rule a visitor matches, a default destination catches every visitor no rule matches, and weights split traffic among the pages inside the matched rule. Keep those layers separate and a campaign stays predictable. Mix them and it gets hard to tell why a visitor saw a given page.
In Tracked, each campaign route can hold several rules. Each rule has its own conditions, its own weighted landing pages, and its own offer pool. The campaign's default destination serves everything else.
The three layers of affiliate traffic distribution rules
| Layer | Question it answers | Example |
|---|---|---|
| Conditions | Which audience is this visitor in? | Country is US and device is Mobile |
| Default destination | Where does unmatched traffic go? | A general prelander for every other visitor |
| Weights | Inside this audience, which page or offer? | Prelander A at 50, Prelander B at 50 |
Conditions are eligibility rules. Weights are a distribution choice. A weight never makes a visitor eligible for a rule, and a condition never splits traffic.
How conditions combine inside a rule
A rule is built from one or more condition groups. Tracked evaluates them with simple boolean logic:
- Different fields in a group must all match. "Country is US" and "device is Mobile" means US and mobile.
- Several values in one field mean any of them. "Device is Desktop, Tablet" matches either.
- Negative operators must exclude every value. "Country is not US, CA" rejects both countries.
- Separate condition groups are alternatives. A visitor who matches any one group matches the rule.
Rules can target country, region, city, continent, timezone, postal code, device, browser, operating system, language, referrer, ASN, IP address or range, URL query parameters, a UTC time window, and bot signals, among other fields. The operators include is, is not, contains, excludes, starts with, ends with, regex, wildcard, is set, and is not set.
Two safety behaviors matter here. A condition with no value never matches, so an unfinished rule does not quietly capture all traffic. An empty condition group is ignored for the same reason.
Fallback: what happens when no rule matches
When a visitor matches no rule, Tracked serves the campaign's default destination. That default can be a hosted page, a proxied page, or a redirect. It can also hold several weighted pages of its own. The hosted, proxy, and redirect guide explains how each mode changes what Tracked can serve and edit.
Treat the default as a real destination, not an afterthought. It receives every visitor your rules did not anticipate: unknown countries, Smart TV browsers, unusual user agents, and traffic from placements you forgot about.
A rule that matches but has no landing page also falls back to the default. Check every rule's action before launch.
Weights within a matched rule
Once a visitor matches a rule, Tracked picks one of that rule's landing pages by weight. Weights are relative, so 50/50, 1/1, and 70/30 all describe intended proportions. Each request is a weighted random pick. The split approaches the configured ratio over a useful sample, not within every block of ten visits.
Offers work the same way one step later. A page links to a stable slot such as /click/1, and the matched rule's offer pool decides where that click goes. The weighted offer rotation guide covers slots and offer weights in detail.
This is how you get a weighted traffic split by audience. Each rule owns one audience, and each audience gets its own split.
Keep rules from overlapping
Write rules so that one visitor can match only one of them. That is the single most useful habit for a predictable campaign.
Overlap happens easily. "Country is US" and "device is Mobile" both match a US mobile visitor. Do not rely on rule order or rule weight to settle that conflict. Make the conditions exclusive instead:
- Rule 1: country is US, device is Mobile
- Rule 2: country is US, device is Desktop, Tablet
- Rule 3: country is CA
No visitor can satisfy two of these. If you need an exclusion, say it outright with is not, rather than counting on another rule to catch the visitor first.
Worked example: one route, three audiences
Hypothetical campaign, not a real result. A media buyer runs one route for an offer accepted in the US and Canada. The network pays more for US mobile leads, and the buyer has two US mobile prelanders to compare.
| Rule | Conditions | Landing pages (weight) | Offer pool |
|---|---|---|---|
| US mobile | Country is US, device is Mobile | Prelander A (50), Prelander B (50) | Offer 1 |
| US desktop and tablet | Country is US, device is Desktop, Tablet | Prelander C (100) | Offer 1 |
| Canada | Country is CA | Prelander D (100) | Offer 2 |
| Default | No rule matched | General page E (100) | Offer 1 |
Now suppose, hypothetically, 10,000 visits arrive: 6,000 US mobile, 2,500 US desktop or tablet, 1,000 Canadian, and 500 from elsewhere.
- About 3,000 US mobile visitors see Prelander A and about 3,000 see Prelander B. The exact counts will vary.
- All 2,500 US desktop and tablet visitors see Prelander C.
- All 1,000 Canadian visitors see Prelander D and click out to Offer 2.
- The 500 remaining visitors see page E. That includes any US Smart TV traffic, because "TV" is a separate device type that neither US rule names.
The A/B comparison is clean because only US mobile traffic enters it. Comparing A against C would mix device and page effects. The split-testing guide covers how to read the result by sales, not clicks.
Rules can also override campaign variables, so Prelander D can show Canadian copy through the same macros. See dynamic landing-page macros for how campaign defaults and rule overrides interact.
Pitfalls: geo-IP, device detection, bots, and testing
Geo-IP is an estimate
Tracked matches country and region against the location Cloudflare reports for the request. That is IP-based. VPNs, corporate networks, mobile carrier gateways, and privacy relays can place a visitor in the wrong country or city. Country is usually more dependable than city. Avoid rules that need city-level precision unless a wrong match is cheap.
Negative conditions include unknowns
When a field is missing from the request, positive operators fail and negative operators pass. "Country is not US" therefore matches traffic whose country is unknown. If that matters, pair the exclusion with a positive condition, such as "continent is EU."
Device types are narrower than you think
Device comes from the user agent. Mobile, Desktop, Tablet, and Smart TV are separate values. A rule for "Mobile" does not include tablets. Name every device type you intend to cover.
Bot conditions are signals, not a firewall
Rules can test the bot and verified-bot signals. These are request-level signals, and some requests carry no signal at all. Use them to keep known crawlers out of a split test or report. Do not use them to show ad reviewers a different page from real visitors; major ad platforms prohibit cloaking. Tracked does not claim fraud prevention.
Test every rule, not just the default
Before spending, send one test visit per rule and one that should hit the default. In Tracked's Logs, each event shows the rule name and the conditions that matched, plus the selected landing page. If a test visit lands under the wrong rule, fix the conditions before checking anything else. The pre-launch QA checklist walks through the full click and conversion test.
Testing geo rules from one office is the hard part. Use a VPN exit in each target country, then confirm the country recorded in the log matches the rule you expected.
Routing rules are not automatic optimization
Every weight in this setup is chosen by the campaign owner. Tracked does not move traffic toward the better prelander by itself. The automatic winner selection guide explains what automated decisions need and where that capability stands. When you change weights, compare pages on equivalent traffic, using a metric such as EPC.
Frequently asked questions
Can Tracked route traffic by device and country in the same rule?
Yes. Add both conditions to one condition group. Different fields in a group must all match, so "country is US" plus "device is Mobile" targets US mobile visitors only.
What happens to visitors who match no rule?
They receive the campaign's default destination. The default can itself hold several weighted pages, so unmatched traffic can still be split.
What if a visitor matches two rules?
Avoid that setup. Write conditions so each visitor can satisfy only one rule, using is not where needed, and confirm with a test visit per rule in Logs.
Do weights have to add up to 100?
No. Weights are relative. 1 and 1 behave like 50 and 50. Each visit is a weighted random pick, so small samples can drift from the configured ratio.
Can each audience have its own offers?
Yes. A rule can carry its own click-out offer pool, so Canadian traffic can click out to a different offer than US traffic from the same page slot.
Start free and build your first device and country routing rule.