Mapping rules
Every report you build groups by the same handful of things: brand, traffic source, country, region and commission plan. Those live on your tracking profiles — and when an integration discovers a few hundred new profiles, they arrive blank. Filling them in by hand is the job nobody finishes, and every report built on top of them is blind until somebody does.
Mapping rules do it for you, by reading the name you already gave the profile.
If FB_BTM_DE means Facebook / BetMGM / Germany to you, a rule can make it mean
that to Routy too.
Nothing here changes your profiles yet. This first release lets you build, check and preview rules so you can see exactly what they would do. Applying them in bulk comes later.
Your rules
Rules are grouped by what they cover, narrowest group first. That grouping is the precedence order: for any field, a rule about one account beats a rule about a program, which beats a rule about a platform, which beats a rule about everything. The up and down arrows reorder rules inside one group only — they can never lift a rule above a narrower one.
Each row also carries its own switch. Turning a rule off leaves it in the list and skips it; it is not deleted. Off and Stops here appear as labels on the row, and worked out counts values Routy filled in for you (see What the values mean).
Suggest a rule
Start here. Instead of a blank form, we read your own profile names and come back with a draft.
We look at up to 5,000 of your profiles, try the common separators (_, -,
|, ., space), take the shape most of your names share, and then test each
position against the things it could actually be — your brands, your
traffic sources, and the country and region
lists. A position is only claimed when we can explain at least half of the
distinct values in it.
Your job is to check it, not to write it. Less sure marks a part where a lot of the values didn't resolve — that's the one to look at first. Open Review this draft and the builder opens pre-filled. A suggested rule always arrives switched off, so nothing is live until you say so.
If your names have no pattern we can use, we'll say so plainly and you can build a rule by hand instead.
Which profiles
A rule covers one of four things:
This is almost always the answer to "why isn't my rule doing anything?" — a narrower rule already set that field. The Why? column in the preview names the rule that got there first.
Two switches on this step change how a rule interacts with the others:
- Stop checking other rules once this one matches — nothing after it is considered for that profile. Note it triggers when the rule's conditions match, even if the rule then fails to work out a value.
- Let this rule replace values an earlier rule set — lets a wider rule take a field a narrower one already claimed. It never touches a value a person entered by hand.
When it applies
Conditions are built from dropdowns and read like a sentence: the tracker id · split into parts by "_" · gives 3 parts.
All conditions have to be true — there's no "or". If you need an either/or, make it two rules.
A rule with no conditions at all applies to every profile it covers. That's perfectly reasonable for a single account ("everything here is brand X"), and usually a mistake anywhere wider.
If you're comfortable with regular expressions, tick Show advanced options to unlock pattern matching and named groups. You never have to — every other operator is enough on its own. A pattern that is invalid, or that takes too long to evaluate, causes the rule to be skipped rather than failing anything.
What it sets
Each row picks a field and says where its value comes from:
- one part of the name — the usual choice, e.g. part 2 of
FB_BTM_DE - the whole name — when the profile name is the brand
- always the same value — a fixed brand or country, chosen from a list
A rule can set each field at most once, and a rule can only ever set these five: brand, traffic source, commission plan, country and region. Nothing else on a tracking profile is rule-writable.
What the values mean
BTM isn't a name any brand actually has — it's your shorthand. The What the
values mean list is where you translate it, and the translation is stored with
the rule, so there's no global dictionary to maintain.
You only need a row for shorthand. Names that are already close enough match on
their own: matching ignores capitals and punctuation, so bet-mgm, Bet MGM
and betmgm all find BetMGM. It goes no further than that, though — nothing
guesses that BTM means BetMGM, so genuine abbreviations always need a row.
Country and region have no list of their own, because they accept either the
code (DE) or the name (Germany).
Rows marked Worked out are ones we figured out from profiles you'd already filled in by hand, and only where the great majority of those profiles agreed. They're usually right, but they're a guess from your data — give them a look before you save.
Check it
Before saving, we check the rule against every profile it covers — not a sample — and tell you in plain English what we found. The two counts at the top are how many profiles the rule covers and how many it actually matched.
Red messages have to be fixed before you can save. Blue ones are advice: the common one asks you to add a condition on the shape of the name, so the rule can't fire on names it was never meant for.
Preview
Preview is the point of the whole feature: it shows what would happen, without touching anything. Open it for one rule from its row, or for everything at once from Preview all at the top of the page.
Preview all only considers rules that are switched on, so it needs at least one. Previewing a single rule includes it even when it's off — which is how you check a rule, or a suggested draft, before turning it on.
Coverage leads, because it's the number that matters — brand: 41% → 88%. Read it as a fill rate: it counts profiles that have a value, not profiles that have the right value. A rule that corrects a brand somebody set wrongly is doing real work and will still show as no change in coverage.
The counts underneath describe the whole scope, however many rows are listed below them.
Anything we couldn't work out appears under Needs your answer: a list of
values like BTM, biggest first, each one dropdown away from being fixed.
Answering one saves it onto the rule straight away and re-runs the preview, so
you can watch coverage move.
Below that, every profile that would change, with its current value and the proposed one. Why? opens the rule-by-rule story for that profile — Matched, Overruled, Skipped, Stopped — which is where a rule that looks inert explains itself. The list shows the first hundred profiles; the counts above it cover all of them.
When rules actually run
Only when you ask. There is no background job and no automatic mapping: a rule is evaluated when you press Check it, Preview, or Preview all, and at no other time. A tracking profile discovered tomorrow is not touched by your rules until somebody runs them.
That also answers the question everyone asks about data already collected. In this release nothing is ever written to a profile, so editing, turning off or deleting a rule changes nothing anywhere. And even later, rules only ever fill in the tracking profile record itself — the clicks and conversions Routy has already recorded carry their own traffic source, brand and country, stamped when the click happened, so click reports are not rewritten behind you.
Common questions
My rule shows "matched" but nothing changed. The value was already set, or a narrower rule set it first. Check the Why? column.
An earlier rule couldn't work out a value — does the next rule get a go? No. Once a rule has claimed a field for a profile it keeps it, even if it then fails to translate the value, and later rules are marked Overruled for that field. Answer the value in Needs your answer rather than adding a second rule behind it.
A brand comes back "could mean X or Y". Two of your brands share a name on that program. Answer it once in Needs your answer and the rule will remember which one you meant.
A brand isn't offered, or comes back "not available on this account's program". A profile can only be given a brand that exists on the program that account belongs to, so the same shorthand can resolve on one account and not on another.
Nothing shows for a commission plan. Commission plans belong to a single account, so a fixed commission plan is only offered on a rule scoped to one account. They're matched on the plan's description.
I turned a rule off — is it gone? No. Off rules stay in the list and are skipped. Use Preview on a single rule to check it before turning it back on.
Do archived profiles count? Yes. Preview covers every profile on the accounts in scope, including ones you have archived — so a coverage percentage can be lower than you expect if you have archived a lot of them.
When can I actually apply this? Not in this release. Rules, checking and preview are here first so the mapping can be got right before anything is written to your profiles.