All personalization targeting rules explained
Detailed reference for every personalization rule in SiteDetour, what it matches on, and common use cases.
Overview
This is the in-depth reference for every personalization rule available in SiteDetour. Each section explains what the rule matches on, how it's derived from the incoming request, and typical use cases.
Geographic rules
Visitor's Country
The country the visitor is browsing from, derived by IP-to-location lookup against an industry-standard geolocation database. Match as a list — e.g. US OR CA OR GB. Accuracy varies: residential ISP IPs are accurate >98% of the time; mobile carrier IPs occasionally geolocate to the carrier's HQ region rather than the actual cell.
Use for: country-specific landing pages, regional compliance pages, localized offers.
Geographic Continent
Rougher geography by continent. Useful when country-level granularity is overkill — e.g. route all European visitors to the EU datacenter landing page.
Geographic Area on Map
A circular region defined by a latitude/longitude center point and a radius. Great for store-locator routing ("within 10 km of our flagship" → the store's booking page) or event geofencing ("within 1 km of the convention center" → the speaker schedule). Accuracy depends on the visitor's IP — mobile visitors generally resolve within a few km of their actual location; VPN users do not.
Date / time rules
Every time rule comes in two flavors: Visitor's and UTC timezone.
- Visitor's — time in the visitor's local timezone. Match "hour of day 9–17" and it fires whenever it's business hours anywhere in the world.
- UTC timezone — time in UTC. Match "hour of day 9–17 UTC" and it fires only during that absolute time window.
Day of Week
Match days (Monday–Sunday) in visitor or UTC timezone. Useful for weekend-only promos or weekday business-hours routing.
Hour of Day
Match specific hours (0–23). Combine with Day of Week for classic business-hours windows.
Time of Day
Minute-precision time windows. Use when the exact cutoff matters (e.g. flash sale ends at 16:30).
Visitor's Timezone
Match the timezone itself (e.g. America/New_York, Europe/London). Derived from IP-to-location lookup as a secondary signal. Useful as a proxy for rough region when country-level targeting is too broad and continent is too broad.
Web browser rules
Web Browser
The browser family parsed from the User-Agent header — Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Edge, Opera, Samsung Internet, etc. Use for browser-specific messaging or upgrade prompts.
Visitor's Device Type
Coarse device class: Desktop, Mobile, Tablet. The bread-and-butter rule for app-store routing and responsive-experience splits.
Visitor's Operating System
The OS parsed from User-Agent: iOS, Android, macOS, Windows, Linux, Chrome OS, etc. More precise than Device Type when you need OS-specific store links.
Visitor's Preferred Language
The list of languages from the Accept-Language header. Match on specific locales (es-MX) or language families (es matches every Spanish variant). Respecting browser language is how most visitors actually signal preference; this rule is usually better than inferring from country.
Request Referrer Type
Classifies the HTTP Referer header into buckets: Direct (no referrer), Organic (from a known search engine), Paid (from a paid-search redirector), Social (from a social network), or Referral (everything else). Useful for "send search traffic to the SEO landing page, send social to the conversion funnel."
Traffic rules
Request Query Parameters
Match on the presence (or specific value) of a query parameter. The universal tool for UTM-driven routing — a single short URL with ?utm_source=twitter vs. ?utm_source=newsletter can route to entirely different destinations.
Composition
Extend an Audience
Include all rules from another audience. The audience-level boolean (AND/OR) applies across the whole expanded rule set. Use for building layered audiences without copying rules:
- Audience Mobile:
Device Type = Mobile. - Audience US market:
Country = US. - Audience US mobile: extends Mobile + US market. Match type AND.
Next steps
