Concatenation: Combining Addue Links
Note: This post is one of a series of tutorial on Addue (https://Addue.com). Addue is an all-in-one marketing toolkit featuring tools such as conversion tracking, A/B split testing, traffic routing by geography and other browser data, link cloaking and more. For more information, please see the Addue website.
Prerequisites:
Getting Started: Links And Linksets
Traffic Routing 1: Route by country based on IP address lookup
Link Cloaking: Protecting the source of your traffic
Note 2: Links and linksets used to be called rules and rulesets. The images in this post still refer to them as rules and rulesets but the software has been updated.
This is a short and (hopefully) sweet tutorial, but it introduces an important concept – link concatenation. Addue links and linksets are pretty powerful when used as presented so far, but their usefulness is even further extended by using them in combination with eachother.
By way of example, we’ll create a combination of country routing with link cloaking. In Traffic Routing 1 (link in the prerequisites above), we created a country routing link that would route traffic according to whether it was coming from the US or UK, with all other traffic going to the DR default link’s destination URL. The link we created there for that purpose was:
https://addue.com/r/route/246/tutorial2
(where 246 will be replaced in your case by your unique account ID on Addue).
Hopefully you still have the links set up in that tutorial ready to go, so that your Addue link will be working correctly; if not we suggest you set them up again now so you can follow along.
To combine this with link cloaking is simplicity itself. Go to your Addue account, and insert a new CL link cloaking link as follows:
Notice that we’ve inserted the country routing Addue link as the destination URL of the cloaking link. Replace 246 with the unique account ID from your link there.
If you go take a look at the linkset for this new cloaking link, you’ll get the Addue link for it in the usual way:
The cloaking link to use has been created as follows:
https://addue.com/r/cl/246/tutorial7
Clicking this link will now do two things:
1. Cloak the incoming traffic
2. Route it according to country
As you can imagine, the traffic is first cloaked by the cloaking link, which then hands it off the country routing link according to its destination URL. The country routing link then performs its own usual function of routing according to where the traffic is coming from.
This is a simple but powerful concept since you can extend it arbitrarily to achieve any function you want by concatenating links as required to get the desired outcome. In the next tutorial, for example, we’ll see how you can concatenate conversion traffic links with traffic splitting ones to do A/B optimization.
Concatenating links does take a bit of planning, and a pencil+paper might be helpful tools to sketch out the flow in your mind before putting links into Addue. As you noticed in this example, we cloaked the traffic first, then applied country routing, not the other way round. If we had done the country routing first, we’d then have to set up a separate cloaking link for each separate destination URL in the country routing linkset. So instead of needing 1 cloaking link and 1 country routing linkset, we’d need 1 country routing linkset and 3 cloaking links, one for each of our three possible landing pages. This would obviously be a less efficient and more confusing way to do things. In general, the less links to accomplish the same task, the better!
One important note: Addue bills each link processed in your concatenation chain as a click for billing purposes. In other words, if a visitor is routed through a chain of say, 3 links, before being redirected out to your target website, this will count as 3 clicks for billing purposes. This charging structure is necessary because it costs Addue 3x the server load in this case to process such a visitor vs. a visitor passing through a single depth link. We hope you’ll agree that Addue’s per click charges are sufficiently low that this isn’t much of a concern, although you certainly want to keep the length of your link processing chain to the minimum necessary.
As always, if you have any questions about link concatenations, please feel free to contact us anytime.
