Traffic rules and the global redirect: deciding who gets served

Not every click is traffic you want. Maybe you do not run a certain country, or a partner keeps sending desktop traffic to a mobile-only offer, or you want to require a specific tracking parameter before a visit counts. Traffic rules decide, at the moment of the click, whether a visitor is served or blocked for an offer. They are distinct from caps, which stop traffic only after a volume threshold — traffic rules are about who, not how many.

How a rule is built

Rules are configured per offer. Each rule has an action — Allow or Block — and one or more conditions, each combining a dimension, an operator, and a value. The dimensions you can match on are:

• Country, by two-letter code;
• Device — mobile, tablet, desktop, or bot;
• Referrer — a domain list, contains, equals, a regex match, or present versus empty;
• URL parameter — a named query parameter that exists, equals, contains, matches, or is one of a set;
• IP address — a list of individual IPs or CIDR ranges.

A rule can require all of its conditions or any of them, and it can carry its own redirect for the traffic it blocks. Rules run top to bottom and the first match wins: a matching Allow serves the click, a matching Block stops it. If nothing matches, the offer's default action — serve or block — decides. Changes take effect within about fifteen seconds.

The allowlist-versus-blocklist trap

This is the part worth reading twice, because it is the most common mix-up. There are two opposite ways to shape traffic, and they require opposite defaults:

• To allow only certain traffic — say, Belgium only — set the default to Block and add an Allow rule for what you want. Everything else falls through to the blocking default.
• To block certain traffic — say, keep one country out — set the default to Serve and add a Block rule for it.

The trap is a Serve default combined with only Allow rules. That serves everyone: your target matches the Allow rule, and everyone else falls through to the permissive default. If you mean "only these," the default has to be Block.

Where stopped traffic goes

A blocked or otherwise unrouteable click needs a destination. The account-wide global redirect is the last link in a fallback chain that runs from a rule's own redirect, to a campaign fallback, to the offer redirect, and finally to the global redirect. You can set it to a URL — sending the visitor there with a 302 — or to an HTTP status code such as 404 for a clean generic not-found page, 410 for gone, or 204 for a silent dead-end. New accounts default to 404, so unrouteable traffic returns a generic page unless you point it at a house offer or homepage instead.

Reviewing what was blocked

Blocked clicks never reached the offer, so they are kept out of your normal click counts. To review them, open your Clicks report and turn on the option to include blocked traffic. Each blocked row shows a badge with the reason — a traffic rule, a stopped offer, a blocked sub-ID, a cap, or an archived campaign — and a column showing exactly where the visitor was actually sent. That lets you confirm, per click, both what was blocked and where it went.

Want us to set up geo and device rules that match how you actually sell? Book a demo and we will build them with you.