Getting Started with Addue: Links And Linksets

Note 1: This post is an introductory tutorial to 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.

Links and linksets are how you control your internet traffic using Addue. You can use any of Addue’s functionality by setting up easy-to-understand links in your Addue account, and combine them with eachother. Linksets are special combinations of links which accomplish a single function. Linksets can then themselves be combined with eachother to accomplish more than one function.

For example, you’d set up a bunch of links and combine them into a linkset to define one function like routing your traffic based on the country of its visitors. You could set up a separate linkset to set up conversion tracking for your website. You could then combine those linksets if you wished to accomplish both functions at once for your site visitors.

In this introductory tutorial we’ll talk about links and combining them into linksets. We’ll look at combining linksets with eachother in a later tutorial.

We’ll use the traffic splitting function Addue provides to illustrate the concept. Traffic splitting refers to taking your incoming stream of traffic and splitting it up into multiple landing pages. The most common use case is A/B optimization, where you’d also need to use conversion tracking links to track the conversions on each of these landing pages. For the moment we won’t be getting into any of that though – A/B optimization and conversion tracking will be covered separately in later tutorials.

To set up some basic traffic splitting links, let’s suppose your website was https://jollyniceflowers.com (doesn’t actually exist last time we checked!). Let’s also suppose you had two landing pages on this site you were experimenting with and wanted to send half your traffic to one, and half to the other. We’ll call these pages https://jollyniceflowers.com/page1 and https://jollyniceflowers.com/page2 for this tutorial.

In your Addue account, under “Links Setup”, click on Insert New Link. On the next page, choose the “SP – Split Routing Link option”. SP is the two letter code used on Addue to refer to traffic splitting links. All Addue links have such a two letter code.

 

 

The form that comes up on the next page is where you actually create the links. The first thing you need to enter is a linkset ID. This is a name you come up with that uniquely identifies the traffic splitting links you’re creating. We’ll need to create a couple of links to accomplish the traffic splitting functionality we want, and each of them need to have exactly the same linkset ID so they’ll be tied together. This will become clear in a moment.

Under linkset ID, enter “tutorial1”. Under destination URL, enter the URL of the first page we want to send traffic to – https://jollyniceflowers.com/page1. Under probability, enter 50. Probability refers to the fact that you want 50% of your traffic going to this page.

 

Your form should look like the picture above. Leave the notes field blank and hit submit. Congrats on entering your first link!

As the next page suggests you can hit List/Edit/Delete Links in the left sidebar to see the link you’ve just entered. Do that and you’ll bring up a list of links, which at the moment just contains this one link. Not all the columns are applicable to traffic splitting links -some like country code are blank as you can see. But you can should see the linkset ID, link code, and destination URL you entered, as well as the 50 percent probability under the probability column. (You can also see something called a “link ID” in the first column. This is just a number Addue assigned to your link which uniquely identifies it on the system.)

 

If you ever need to edit or delete a link, the Edit/Delete links on the listing page in the right hand column can be used for this.

By itself, this link you just entered is insufficient. We just instructed Addue that half of our traffic needs to go to https://jollyniceflowers.com/page1. We now need to tell Addue that the other half needs to go to https://jollyniceflowers.com/page2. To do that, go back to your main account page (choose Manage Account from the Account tab in the top right). Then click on Insert New Link again. Choose the SP – Split Ruling Link option again.

We’re now entering the second link on the next page. Under linksetID make sure to enter “tutorial1” exactly as you did for the first link. This creates a linkset of 2 links – the one you’re entering now and the one you just entered. Linksets are links which Addue has to process together. When traffic for your website comes in, Addue will look at both of these links in deciding what to do with, which is you want.

Under destination URL, enter https://jollyniceflowers.com/page2 and under probability enter 50. This page is also assigned a 50% probability like the other landing page, meaning that each of them will have a 50-50 chance of being presented to site visitors.

 

Once you hit submit you can take a look at your links under List/Edit/Delete Links. You should be able to see both links you entered.

You could have a long list of links on this page, all accomplishing different functions and assigned different linksets. To focus on one linkset, just click its linkset ID in any of its component links.

Let’s do that now. Click on the linkset ID “tutorial1” in any of the two links you’ve entered. This brings up a similar page like the one below:

 

You can see the two links in the tutorial1 linkset defining a traffic splitting linkset which will send 50% of the traffic to your page1 landing page and the other 50% to page2. You can also see the Addue link you’ll actually use to invoke this link, at the top of the linkset list:

https://addue.com/r/split/246/tutorial1

(The number 246 between split/ and /tutorial will be different for you – it’s your unique account ID on Addue).

Click on this link a few times. You’ll see that the traffic sometimes goes to https://jollyniceflowers.com/page1 and sometimes to https://jollyniceflowers.com/page2. Addue is correctly routing the traffic in a 50-50 percent probability ratio to these 2 pages. Effectively it’s throwing a coin each time the link is clicked to figure out which landing page to use for that click.

You can also see a live report on the clicks coming in through your freshly created Addue link in your Addue account. On your account main page, click on “Click History” under the Results section to see this:

 

Each line on this report screen represents a click hitting your Addue link, along with other data such as the IP address it’s coming from, where Addue decided to send it (destination URL), and the link ID applied.

And that’s it for this tutorial. We’ll start learning more about each of Addue’s available link types in the next tutorial, starting with IP-based country traffic routing. Traffic splitting links themselves will be examined in more detail too, in a later tutorial.