Stop Guessing Where Your Traffic Goes: How Redirect Metrics Help You Direct Visitors to the Right Place
Most people set up redirects and never look at them again. A domain migration happens, a few hundred rules get created, and the assumption is that traffic flows correctly from old URLs to new ones. That assumption is often wrong — and without data, you have no way to know.
Redirect analytics change that. When you can see every redirect broken down by path, count, and destination, a new class of problem becomes visible: traffic that's arriving, being redirected, and landing in the wrong place.
The problem with blind redirects
When you acquire a domain, migrate a site, or consolidate multiple properties, you create redirect rules based on what you know at the time. But you rarely know exactly which paths on the old domain are still receiving meaningful traffic six months later.
The result is a pattern that's nearly invisible without data:
/old-product-page→ gets 800 visits a month, redirects to your homepage/old-blog/how-to-use-x→ gets 400 visits a month, redirects to your blog index/pricing-2023→ gets 200 visits a month, redirects to a page that no longer exists
Every one of those redirects fires correctly in the technical sense. The 301 is issued, the visitor is sent somewhere, and your monitoring shows no errors. But the traffic lands on a page that has nothing to do with what the visitor was looking for — and from an SEO perspective, you have wasted the link equity that came with it.
Without path-level metrics, this is invisible. With them, it takes about five minutes to spot.
Why destination accuracy matters for SEO
Google uses 301 redirects to transfer ranking signals from old URLs to new ones. When a page accumulates backlinks, click history, and topical authority over years, that value doesn't disappear when the URL changes — it follows the redirect to wherever you point it.
If you point it to your homepage, the signal gets absorbed by a page that probably already has strong authority on different topics. The original page's topical relevance is diluted and effectively wasted.
If you point it to a closely matched page — same topic, same search intent — the signal reinforces a page that can actually rank for the relevant query. The difference between these two outcomes is entirely in the redirect destination. And the only way to audit your destinations systematically is to see them alongside the traffic volume they're handling.
This is especially important for acquired domains. When you buy a domain to consolidate a competitor or capture a brand, you inherit their entire URL structure and backlink profile. Some of those URLs have significant authority your new domain can benefit from — but only if the redirects are specific enough to actually use it.
A single catch-all redirect from an acquired domain to your homepage passes one signal to one page. Specific redirects from each high-traffic path to its equivalent on your new site passes many signals to many relevant pages. The second approach is dramatically more effective for SEO, and you can only build it if you know which paths have traffic.
What the analytics show you
Traffic over time
The chart shows redirects per hour for the last 7 days, or per day for the last 30. Traffic spikes on old domains often correspond to a backlink being discovered, content being shared somewhere, or Google recrawling URLs it had previously deprioritized. Seeing the trend tells you whether a domain's traffic is growing, shrinking, or stable — which tells you how much attention it deserves.
A sudden spike in misses — redirects that fired but found no matching rule — usually means a URL pattern changed that you didn't account for. Catching that early means fixing it before the traffic bleeds away.
Hit rate
Hit rate is the percentage of redirect requests that matched a specific rule. A high hit rate on a well-configured domain typically looks like 95%+. A hit rate of 60% on an acquired domain means 40% of incoming traffic is falling through to a catch-all or returning a 404 — traffic you're losing because your rules don't cover the paths that are actually being requested.
Top paths — the most actionable number in the dashboard
The top paths list shows which source URLs are driving the most volume, ranked by request count. This is the list you use to audit your redirect accuracy.
Take the top 20 paths. For each one, look at where it's going. Ask: is this destination the most relevant page on my new site for that topic? If the answer is no, updating that one rule can meaningfully improve where link equity flows and what queries those pages can rank for.
Paths that show high volume but route to your homepage are the highest-priority fixes. Paths with no volume at all are candidates for removal — they add noise without contributing anything.
Top destinations — the audit you didn't know you needed
The destinations list shows where your traffic is actually ending up, aggregated across all redirect rules for that domain. A healthy redirect setup has destinations spread across many relevant pages on your site. Each old URL's authority flows to a specific target that can use it.
If your homepage dominates the destinations list, that's a signal your rules are too coarse. You're concentrating traffic on a page that doesn't benefit from topical specificity — and leaving ranking potential on the table for every query those old URLs could have supported.
Cross-domain totals on the main dashboard
The dashboard now shows total redirect volume for each domain over the last 7 days, sortable by traffic. When you manage multiple domains — acquisitions, retired brands, migration sources — this makes it easy to prioritize. Start your audits with the highest-traffic domains. The ones getting 10 visits a month can wait.
A practical audit workflow
Once you have this data, the audit is straightforward:
1. Sort the dashboard by redirects. Start with the highest-traffic domain.
2. Open that domain's analytics. Go to the top paths list.
3. For each high-traffic path, check the destination. Is it the most relevant page on your new site for that topic?
4. Update rules that are pointing traffic to the wrong place. Specifically: any path routing to your homepage when a more relevant page exists.
5. Check hit rate. If it's below 90%, add rules to cover the paths that are falling through.
6. Repeat quarterly. Traffic patterns on old domains change as Google recrawls them and backlinks age.
This process takes less than an hour per domain the first time. After that, the monthly check is a five-minute scan.
How it works under the hood
Analytics are captured at the edge — the same layer that serves your redirects in under 20ms globally. After every redirect decision, hit or miss, a structured data point is written to our analytics pipeline. That write is fire-and-forget, so it adds zero latency to the redirect itself.
Each event captures the source path, destination URL, and whether the request matched a rule. Those events are aggregated into the totals, time series, and ranked lists you see in the dashboard. Data appears within about a minute of each redirect firing and is retained for 31 days.
Available on Pro and Agency plans
Analytics — including the per-domain breakdown, path and destination lists, traffic chart, and cross-domain dashboard totals — is available on Pro ($15/mo) and Agency ($59/mo) plans.
The worker collects data for all domains regardless of plan, so if you upgrade later, your history is already there.