Campaigns and flows

A campaign is one decision, made per click: where does this visitor go? Everything else on it exists to answer that question, or to record what happened after.

#What kind of campaign

Three modes, and the choice changes what counts as a win:

Pick the wrong one and nothing breaks — it changes which screens make sense and what the funnel is measured between.

#The flow

The routing structure nests one level deeper than a flat list, and the extra level is what lets you split traffic differently for different visitors:

Rule (conditions)
  └─ Paths (weighted)
       └─ Landers + Offers (weighted)

Rules carry conditions. Paths under a rule split the traffic that matched it. Landers and offers under a path are what the visitor is actually sent to.

Two ordering facts do most of the work:

• The first rule that matches wins outright. Not every matching rule — the first. Order them from most specific to least, or the general one at the top swallows everything below it.
• Default paths carry no conditions and take whatever reaches them. Every flow needs one, or a visitor matching nothing has nowhere to go.

#Weights

A weight is a share, not a percentage, and does not need to total 100. Two paths at 1 and 3 send a quarter and three quarters.

The split is random per click, not a round-robin. Over a hundred clicks a 50/50 will not be exactly fifty — that is what random means, and a lopsided split on small numbers is usually nothing. Check it on the clicks log with the Sent to column before concluding a rotation is broken.

Random rather than a counter is deliberate: a counter needs shared state on every request, which is cheap on one server and expensive across an edge network. Random converges to the same distribution and costs nothing, so routing behaves identically wherever it runs.

A weight of zero takes no traffic, which is how you park a lander without deleting it and losing its history.

#Rules

A rule is a set of conditions. These are what a condition can test:

Operators: equals not_equals contains not_contains in not_in greater_than less_than between regex exists not_exists.

in with a list is almost always what you want over several equals rules — one rule saying country in [US, CA, GB] is one thing to read and one thing to edit.

#Saved rules and flows

A rule or a whole flow can be saved to a library and copied into a campaign, so "US mobile" is written once rather than rebuilt by hand for the tenth campaign.

Copied, never referenced. Editing a saved rule does not reach into campaigns already taking traffic on a copy of it. That is the point: the blast radius of a mistyped country list is this rule, not every campaign that ever used it.

The consequence is worth knowing — fixing a saved rule does not fix the campaigns built from it. Those are edited one at a time.

To see routing across campaigns — where does mobile traffic go, what happens to a visitor from Germany — use the In use view under Tools → Rules, which lists every routing rule on every campaign, read-only. A campaign's own routing is written in one place only, the campaign's flow editor: two writers for one structure is how a rule ends up saying different things depending on which screen you opened.

#What a campaign hands you

Three links, each for a different party. Take them from the campaign's Tracking tab rather than assembling one.

The tracking URL is the one worth taking rather than editing: only the version on that tab carries the chosen source's macros, and a macro spelled almost right substitutes nothing at all.

#The funnel

Each campaign has a funnel view: how many arrived, how many reached a lander, how many pressed through, how many converted — each step shown both as a share of the step above it and as a share of the first, so you are not dividing in your head.

It can be split by lander or by source, which turns "the campaign converts at 2%" into which lander is carrying it.