Conditional Form Routing to Google Sheets - Route by Field Value

Conditional routing is the ability to inspect a submitted form field and use its value to determine where the data is delivered. Instead of a single static webhook URL, you define rules like:

• If department equals "Sales" > send to the Sales Team sheet
• If department equals "Support" > send to the Support Queue sheet
• If country starts with "US" > send to the North America sheet
• If budget contains "enterprise" > send to the Enterprise Pipeline sheet

This is different from form-level conditional logic (showing or hiding fields based on user input). Routing happens after submission, at the delivery layer. The user never sees it - they just submit the form.

SheetLinkWP provides eight comparison operators:

• Equals - Exact match (case-insensitive). Example: department equals "Sales"
• Not Equals - Matches anything except the specified value. Example: country not equals "US"
• Contains - Field value includes the substring. Example: message contains "urgent"
• Not Contains - Field value does not include the substring. Example: email not contains "@gmail"
• Starts With - Field value begins with the specified prefix. Example: phone starts with "+44"
• Ends With - Field value ends with the specified suffix. Example: email ends with "@company.com"
• Regex - Matches a regular expression pattern. Example: zip regex ^(90|91|92)\d{3}$
• Exists - Field has any non-empty value. Example: company_name exists

The regex operator accepts any valid PHP regular expression for complex pattern matching.

Configuring conditional routing in SheetLinkWP takes under five minutes:

1. Open SheetLink > Routing Rules in your WordPress admin dashboard.
2. Click "Add Rule" and select the form you want to route.
3. Choose the field to evaluate. SheetLinkWP lists all fields from the selected form automatically.
4. Pick an operator from the dropdown and enter your comparison value.
5. Set the destination - either a different webhook URL pointing to another Google Sheet, or a tab name parameter.
6. Assign a priority number (1 = highest priority). Click Save.
7. Repeat for additional routing conditions.

Rules are evaluated top-to-bottom by priority. The first rule that matches determines the destination (unless you have enabled multi-destination mode).

Department routing - A corporate "Contact Us" form has a "Department" dropdown with options: Sales, Support, Billing, Partnerships. Four routing rules send each department's inquiries to their team's sheet.

Location-based routing - An international company routes by the "Country" field. US visitors go to the North America sales sheet. European submissions go to the EMEA sheet.

Product type routing - An e-commerce site's pre-sales inquiry form includes a "Product Category" field. Electronics inquiries route to the electronics team, apparel to the apparel team.

Lead qualification routing - A B2B SaaS company routes based on "Company Size". Enterprises (1000+ employees) go to the enterprise sales pipeline. SMBs go to the self-serve funnel.

When multiple routing rules could match the same submission, SheetLinkWP uses a deterministic priority system:

• Lower priority number wins. A rule with priority 1 is evaluated before priority 2.
• Same priority = insertion order. If two rules have the same priority number, the rule created first takes precedence.
• Default fallback. If no rule matches at all, the submission goes to your default webhook URL. No data is ever lost.

Best practice: Put your most specific rules at the highest priority (lowest number) and your broadest rules at the bottom.

Sometimes you need a submission to go to more than one place. SheetLinkWP handles this two ways:

• Multi-destination mode - instead of first-match-wins, all matching rules fire. The submission is delivered to every matching destination in parallel.
• Fan-Out add-on - for more complex scenarios, the Fan-Out add-on ($19/mo) lets you define explicit multi-target delivery chains that send to Google Sheets, Slack, email, and webhooks simultaneously.

Both approaches use SheetLinkWP's retry queue, so if one destination is temporarily unavailable, deliveries to the other destinations are unaffected.