One of the most important parts of setting up an experiment is deciding which pages of your website you want to run it on. This can be done easily  in PageSense using the Advanced URL targeting option, which allows you to choose either a single page or a group of pages to focus your experiment on, instead of running them on the entire website or domain. Based on the specific string or URL pattern selected, PageSense will then activate your A/B test variations, goals, push notifications, pop-ups, and any other type of experiment to the visitors targeted on these pages.

For example, URL matching can be used to run an experiment on the checkout funnel of your customer journey, a specific category of your blog site, or just the homepage of your business website. This method of targeting can be effectively used to analyze visitor behavior that is particular to a page, and further optimize the webpages based on specific audience segments. 

Info:

1. Use simple match when you want to test a single page on your website.
   

1. Use exact match to run experiments only when the visitors land on the exact URL.
   

1. Use URL pattern match to target pages with specific strings of texts within the URL.  It's useful for experiments that change the same element site-wide or on multiple URLs.
   

1. Use URL starts with match to target pages starting with identical strings at the beginning of their URLs.
   

1. Use URL ends with match to target pages with identical strings at the end of their URLs.
   

1. Use regex match to target complicated URL structures.
   

The URL targeting in PageSense also contains the Include URLs and Exclude URLs options that allows you to run your experiment on multiple pages with required match types, and, if required, remove certain web pages from the experiment pages, respectively.

The typical structure of a URL appears as below

Different URL match types in PageSense

1. This is the default match type, and is used for targeting a single page on your site. 
   

2. A Simple URL match checks for a match with: Domain and Path.
   

3. The experiment will run on the page when the exact values are present in the target URL's domain and path.
   

4. A Simple URL match will exclude: query parameters, case insensitivity, fragments and protocol or trailing slashes
   

Example: Suppose you own an e-commerce site and you want to track goal conversions on the 'Sign up' button available in your main page https://zylkerfashions.com/. In this case, you can select PageSense's Simple URL match targeting condition from the Type dropdown to target visitors to this specific page as shown below.

Note: By default, Simple URL match type is selected while creating your experiment.

Exact match

• This URL match type includes the query strings and fragments and is used to run your experiment on pages that EXACTLY match with the target URL.
  

• The Exact URL match checks for a match with: Domain, Path, Query parameters, and Fragments.
  

• An Exact match does not ignore any part of the URL.
  

• The Exact match may come in handy when you need to exclude a page with a particular query.
  

Example: Suppose you have a set of landing pages created specifically for online marketing and you want run a heatmap experiment on a particular page 'http://www.zylkerfashions.com/landingpage1'. Then, you can enable Advanced radio button and select PageSense's Exact URL match type to target customers and see the number of clicks/goal conversions on this exact page as shown below.

Also, here are some examples of common variants that will and will not match a exact match type for the sample URL: http://zylkerfashions.com/landingpage1

URL pattern matches with

• This match type is used to target more than one page of your website. 
  

• The URL pattern match is defined by substituting variable parts of the URL with the wildcard * (an asterisk). 
  

Example: Suppose you own an ecommerce site and you want to test a unique product offer to worldwide customers from different domains. In this case, you can use the 'URL pattern' match type like 'https://zylkerfashions.%2A/product/' to record visitor conversion on your shopping site from various domains such .eu,.in and .com as shown below.

Also, here are some examples of common variants that will and will not match a URL pattern match type for the sample URL: https://zylkerfashions.*/product/ 

URL contains

• This match type targets all pages which contains the entered text string. The string or keyword is case-insensitive. 
  

• 'URL contains' match type is useful when targeting a unique query string parameter that appears in multiple URLs.  
  

Example: Suppose you want to track time spent on goal on the pages containing the keyword 'blog' on your website. In this case, you can enable the Advanced button and select the PageSense's 'URL contains' match type with the string 'blog' to track conversion goals on this particular set of URLs as shown below.

Also, here are some examples of common variants that will and will not match a URL contains match type for the keyword: blog

Note: You can use URL Contains to target a particular campaign or a set of campaigns using their unique ID or key..

URL starts with

• This type of match type is used to target pages that start with the entered text which is case-insensitive.
  

• Used when you want to show notifications or run experiments only on some sections of your website. 
  

Example: Suppose you run an e-commerce business and you want to track form submissions on the checkout page of your shopping site that has the URL something like: http://www.zylkerfashions.com/checkout.cgi?page=1&id=1234567. In this case, the id varies for every other visitor who land on the checkout page.
Hence, you can select PageSense's 'URL Starts with' match type from the dropdown to activate the form experiment and track conversions on all pages starting with http://www.zylkerfashions.com/checkout regardless of the user ID at the end of the URL as shown below.

Also, here are some examples of common variants that will and will not match a URL starts with match type for the sample URL: http://www.zylkerfashions.com/checkout 

 URL ends with

• This match type is used to target pages that ends with the entered value in the end of the URL. 
  

• The experiment will run if the URL ends with the matching criteria (pages).
  

Example: Let us say you own an online shopping store and you want to setup a customer feedback poll in the confirmation page of your site that uses /thankyou.html at the end of your URL. In this case, you can use the 'URL ends with' match type to activate the website poll on all the pages that end with /thankyou.html as shown below.

URL regex matches with   

• Regular Expressions (RegEx) are much advanced URL search patterns to run an experiment on a wide range of web pages in your website.
  

• It is a special text string for describing a search pattern and is used to target multiple and complicated URLs simultaneously that are not easily captured by the other URL match types.
  

• The Regex pattern must be entered between slashes. For example, to target all the pages on your site where the snippet is implemented, use a regular expression match and enter .* as your match condition. 
  

• The regular expression allows you to use special characters and wildcards to match the URL structure of your website. 
  

Include multiple pages in your experiment

For example, say, you want to launch a heatmap on your landing page, product page, and checkout page of your ecommerce site to understand your visitor's interaction on the common elements of your website and to see which page gets the highest conversion.

To do this:
Enable the Advanced button while creating the Heatmap, click the Plus icon + to choose the required match type from the dropdown and add the URLs to include in your experiment as shown in the figure below. Now, PageSense will track visitor interactions on this set of pages.

Exclude pages from your experiment

If you want to show a set of changes on all pages except a few, then you can use the Exclude URL option within the Advanced URL targeting feature by adding the URLs of the page where you do not want to target your experiment and do not want to show the change. 

For example, say, you want to show a feedback poll across all the blogs except for the articles published in the first quarter of the year i.e. January, February, and March. In this case, you can choose to exclude these specific set of pages as shown below. 

Enable the Advanced option, click the Exclude Pages button and enter the URL of the page(s) where you do not want to display the survey on your site as shown in the figure below.