Smart links and link rules

URL shortening will never be the same.

Today we at once.to announce a massive feature that has just been rolled out: smart links!

This new feature opens limitless possibilities of tailoring the behaviour of your short links to your needs. From now on, you can choose the destination URL based on the visitor’s country, browser, device type, language, and other characteristics.

Enter smart links

In short, once.to has got a sophisticated rule engine. It allows you to define a list of rules which define the URL your visitor will be redirected to.

Here’s one, maybe a bit artificial, example of how that might look like — just to showcase what one can do with it:

The rule engine supports an unlimited number of rules per link. Each rule can have a number of criteria, such as country or browser, each with a list of values to check against.

Different values broaden the target group, whereas different criteria, when combined, narrow it (refer to the corresponding KB article to learn more). And should you want multiple target groups to be redirected to the same URL, you can simply create several rules, all pointing to that URL.

One important thing to mention: if none of the defined rules matched, the visitor be then redirected to the link’s target URL, which is exactly the way it worked without rules, so all your links are backwards-compatible.

A/B testing made easy

An intent reader can notice an unusual criterion on the screenshot above: the probability. It is just what you think it is: the chance of this rule to be taken into consideration.

With the default value of 100% it is simply ignored; when set to 0% it effectively deactivates the rule.

Anything in between these two values will cause the rule to be occasionally evaluated — with the specified probability.

This setting allows, among other things, to configure any website for so-called A/B testing, when the visitor is randomly redirected to one of two (or more) versions of the same page.

For more real-life use cases and an elaborate explanation please refer to our documentation.

Tags: A/B testing, blog, browser detection, clicks, geolocation, language detection, link rules, probability, redirect, security, short link, short URL, smart link