Custom Domains

Every click your traffic produces flows through a tracking URL. By default, that URL lives on the tracking platform's domain, which means every visitor sees a domain that isn't yours, and every redirect carries someone else's brand. For coupon, content, and review publishers, the platform-branded URL is also a clear signal that the link is monetised, which costs clicks. Custom domains fix all of that. You point your own domain (or a subdomain of it) at Routy, and from that moment on every brand link, cloaked link, redirect, and postback URL uses the domain you picked.

The setup is supposed to be easy and it is — most accounts go from "no custom domain" to "every link on our domain" in under fifteen minutes, including the SSL certificate provisioning.

After connecting your domain, the following becomes available:

• Branded tracking URLs: links like links.yourbrand.com/route/123 or go.yourbrand.com/deals/summer-sale instead of a generic routy.io/r/abc123. The domain matches your site, the visitor sees nothing unexpected, and the click rate tends to improve as a result.
• Automatic SSL certificates for every domain you add, including ones you bring from your own registrar. The certificates renew themselves and you never see the warning a misconfigured certificate would otherwise generate.
• Multiple domains per account: different brands, different verticals, different regions, all under one Routy login. A publisher running a US betting site and a UK gambling site can have links.usbet.com and go.ukgambling.com both pointing at the same Routy account, each producing brand-correct URLs.
• Works everywhere: brand links, cloaked links with geo-targeting, simple redirects, postback URLs — the domain you choose applies to all of them automatically. Nothing on the platform falls back to a generic URL once you've configured a custom domain.

A note on the long-term value: a custom tracking domain is a small SEO and trust-equity asset that compounds. Visitors who see your domain in the URL bar are more likely to click, more likely to trust the destination, and more likely to come back. Tracking domains you've built up brand recognition for also survive any future tracking-platform migration without losing the link history.

You have two paths for setting up a custom domain.

Path one (recommended for most users): a subdomain on Routy's zone. You pick a subdomain (e.g. links.yourbrand.com), Routy provisions the DNS and SSL automatically, and the domain is live within a few minutes.

Path two: bring your own domain from your registrar. You add a CNAME record pointing the domain at Routy, Routy provisions the SSL certificate via SSL for SaaS, and the domain is live once DNS propagation completes — usually under an hour, occasionally longer depending on your registrar.

Both paths use the same SSL provisioning system, both produce the same end result, and you can move between them. The DNS record itself is a standard CNAME (or A record for apex domains where supported).

A few practical notes:

• Apex domains (e.g. yourbrand.com rather than links.yourbrand.com) work but require either A records or a registrar that supports CNAME at the apex. Most modern registrars do.
• SSL certificates renew automatically. If a domain ever fails renewal — usually because a CNAME has been removed — you'll see a notification in the Routy dashboard rather than learning about it from a broken visitor.
• You can change which domain is the default for new links at any time, and existing links continue working on whatever domain they were created under unless you bulk-migrate them.

Most operations underestimate how much the tracking domain matters until they switch. A coupon site that goes from routy.io/r/xyz to deals.yoursite.com/r/xyz typically sees click-through on the same content jump by something between 5 and 15 percent, simply because the URL looks safe and on-brand instead of unfamiliar. For publishers with significant social or email distribution, the effect compounds — a branded URL in an email subject line or a social post survives the increasingly aggressive link-preview filters that mark unknown domains as suspicious.

There's a defensive case too. Tracking-platform domains that get used at scale across multiple affiliates occasionally end up on shared blocklists, which is the kind of thing you only discover when a meaningful slice of your traffic stops converting overnight. A domain you own is your problem to keep clean, not a problem you inherit from whichever other affiliates use the same shared platform domain.

The setup is small enough that there's no real reason not to do it, and the upside is large enough that doing it is usually one of the first things experienced affiliates configure on a new account.