Case Study: Migrating a High‑Traffic Campaign to Edge Redirects

Case Study: Migrating a High‑Traffic Campaign to Edge Redirects

Hook: Campaigns spike traffic and expose redirect design flaws. This field report walks through a real migration we ran in 2025–26 to illustrate the tradeoffs and the measurable wins from edge redirects.

Background and goals

Our client runs seasonal product drops that drive spikes of 200k clicks/hour on short domains. Traffic spikiness caused origin latency and inconsistent conversion rates. Goals were clear:

• Reduce median redirect latency under 20ms.
• Keep analytics and attribution intact while respecting privacy settings.
• Control edge function spend under a fixed budget.

Approach

We used a hybrid migration over six weeks:

1. Move deterministic redirects to CDN config (fast path).
2. Deploy small edge workers for geo and inventory-aware routing.
3. Aggregate sampled telemetry to a central store for lift analysis.

When comparing provider performance and pricing constraints, we leaned on public benchmarks such as Best CDN + Edge Providers Reviewed (2026) to choose a provider that balanced latency and predictable pricing.

Technical details

• Routing table: top 500 targets cached at edge and updated via signed manifests.
• Edge workers: stateless hash-based assignment for experiments and fallback logic.
• Telemetry: 2% sampling for raw click logs; aggregated cohort metrics for business stakeholders.

Cost control levers

To avoid surprises we:

• Implemented execution time limits and memory caps on workers.
• Used CDN rules for the majority of traffic to avoid function costs.
• Simulated traffic patterns against provider pricing to forecast spend.

If you’re evaluating provider cost control mechanisms, independent hands-on reviews like Hands-On Review: dirham.cloud Edge CDN & Cost Controls (2026) show how providers implement safeguards and what to look for in contracts.

Outcomes

• Median redirect latency dropped from 160ms to 18ms.
• Conversion rate improved by 7% on low-bandwidth connections.
• Support tickets related to “slow redirects” fell by 36%.

What we learned

1. Deterministic CDN rules are the cheapest and fastest path for stable redirects.
2. Edge workers should be used sparingly and with strict cost limits.
3. Observability must be designed around sampling to preserve privacy and control costs.

Broader context

Campaigns often interlock with other product strategies — for example, pop-up sales and hybrid event strategies. The playbook for converting pop-ups into lasting channels is described in From Pop-Up to Permanent: Converting Hype Listings into Neighborhood Anchors, which offers strategic lessons about converting campaign momentum into persistent traffic sources and how link lifecycle factors in.

Implementation checklist

• Identify top targets and move them to CDN rules.
• Keep edge functions stateless with time limits.
• Sample telemetry and run cohort-based lift analysis.
• Model provider costs under spike scenarios before launch.

Conclusion: For seasonal high-traffic campaigns, the hybrid edge approach delivered lower latency, better conversions, and predictable costs. Start with deterministic CDN rules, add small stateless edge functions for conditional logic, and instrument using sampling and cohort analysis.