Targeting and deep links
One link, the right destination for every visitor
A single short link can send German visitors to your German store, iPhone users into the App Store and everyone else to the main page. Rules are ordered, the first match wins, and you can see the order rather than guess at a precedence table.
Rules are an ordered list, and order is the whole point
A targeting rule combines a destination with any of four conditions: country, device type, operating system and browser language. Conditions inside a rule are combined with AND, so "Android in Brazil" is one rule, not two. Rules are evaluated top to bottom and the first complete match wins; if none match, the visitor gets the base destination.
That is a deliberate design choice. Systems that score rules by specificity are impossible to debug once there are more than three of them, whereas an ordered list can be read aloud. You reorder rules by dragging them, or with move-up and move-down buttons that work from a keyboard and on a phone, where dragging is a coin toss.
Country and city come from the edge network resolving the request, so no third-party lookup is added to the redirect path. Device, operating system and browser are parsed from the request at the same moment, and the identical parsed signals are reused for the click event — the report and the routing decision can never disagree.
Deep links open the app instead of a mobile web page
Every link carries an optional iOS destination and an optional Android destination. When a mobile visitor arrives, the platform-specific URL is used before targeting rules are considered, so you can send phone traffic into a native app while desktop traffic keeps going to the website.
Those fields accept whatever the platform needs: a custom scheme that opens an installed app directly, a universal or app link that lets the operating system decide, or a store URL as the fallback for visitors who do not have the app yet. Because the routing happens on our side, the same shared link works in an SMS, an email, a bio and a printed QR code without three separate campaigns.
Deep link support was a paid upgrade at most vendors as of August 2026 — Short.io from its Team plan, Rebrandly only from Growth. Here it is a field on the link, available on every plan a partner sells.
What targeting is actually used for
Localisation is the obvious case: one link on a global campaign that resolves to the right language, the right currency and the right legal footer. Regional compliance is the less obvious one, where visitors from a jurisdiction you do not serve are routed to an explanatory page instead of a checkout they cannot complete.
App install campaigns split by operating system, so the same creative works across networks. Affiliate and media buying use country rules to honour offer availability, since sending traffic to a geo an advertiser does not accept is how commissions get voided. Events use device rules to send phones to a mobile agenda and desktops to a registration form.
- Country — a rule per market, ordered by priority
- Device — phone, tablet and desktop treated separately
- Operating system — iOS and Android beyond the deep-link fields
- Language — the browser preference, for markets that share a country
Targeting composes with everything else on the link
Targeting sits in the middle of a fixed evaluation order. Expiry and password come first, because an expired or locked link should not route anywhere. Social crawlers are answered with your preview markup before any routing, so a shared link renders one consistent card regardless of which country the crawler runs in. Deep links come next, then targeting, then the A/B split for visitors no rule claimed, then pixels.
Campaign tags are appended to whichever destination wins, so a German visitor who matched rule two still arrives with the campaign parameters intact. In analytics, targeted traffic keeps its country and device dimensions, which is how you find out that a rule you added six weeks ago is catching more traffic than the base destination.
Frequently asked questions
How accurate is the country detection?
Country comes from the edge network that terminates the request, which resolves it at the network level rather than by a database lookup on an address you send it. It is accurate at country level and reliable at city level for most traffic; VPN users resolve to wherever their exit node is.
What happens when no rule matches?
The visitor goes to the base destination of the link. That is also what happens if a rule references something the request does not expose, so a link with targeting is never less functional than a link without it.
Can I combine targeting with an A/B test?
Yes. Targeting is evaluated first, so visitors matched by a rule go to that destination, and everyone left over enters the split. A common setup is a country rule for your two biggest markets and a split across two landing pages for the rest of the world.
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