Simple match

Simple match is the default URL match type, and it's ideal for running experiments on single pages. A simple match will run when visitors land on a URL, even if it has these variations:

• Adding or changing a query parameter (like http://www.example.com/?utm_campaign=january).

• Adding or changing a hash parameter (like http://www.example.com/#about).

• Changing protocol between http:// and https:// (like http://www.example.com/ vs. https://www.example.com/).

• Adding or removing a trailing slash at the end of your URL (like http://www.example.com vs. http://www.example.com/).

• Adding or removing 'www' from your URL (like http://www.example.com vs. http://example.com).

Simple match ignores these changes (because they usually don’t change the way your page displays) and runs your experiment on the page.

To use simple match, enter the full URL of the page you want to target—the absolute URL, not a relative URL like /products/general.html. Here are examples of common variants that will pass a simple match:

These examples match because they run on the same page as the original URL. Even adding query (?) or hash (#) parameters doesn't generally change the page.

What won't match the original? Simple match won’t ignore changeshanges in subdomain (aside from www), adding .html or other extensions, or adding or changing subdirectories.

Here are some examples that won’t pass a simple match:

These examples won’t match the original URL because they are not the same page:

• http://www.example.com/in does not have the added extension of http://www.example.com/index.html.

• http://www.example.com does not have the same subdirectory as https://www.example.com/january.

• http://www.example.com/ does not have the same subdomain as http://www.blog.example.com/.

Example: User account page with many dynamic/unique query string values

You want to run an experiment on a “My Account” page for all of your customers. However, every account URL includes query parameters that are unique to a particular user’s information. A sample Account URL would be:
www.match.com/myaccount?account_id=1234&location=san_francisco

To set it up:

1. Identify the static and dynamic portions of the account page URL.
   
   In this case, the URL to the left of the “?” is always the same (static), and the parameters to the right of the “?” are unique to each user (dynamic).

2. In URL Targeting, select Simple match from the dropdown. Add the account URL, excluding all query string parameters (in this case, www.match.com/myaccount).
   
   A simple match ignores anything to the right of the question mark in the URL (all query string parameters). In this case, ?account_id=1234&location=san_francisco would be ignored, which is what we want since this is the dynamic portion of the account page URL.

This setup ensures that your experiment will run on all account pages, regardless of the unique user who is viewing the page.

Example: Visitors who land on only two of many landing pages

You have about 10 landing pages live at any one time, and you want to run an A/B test on only two of these pages. You know there will always be unique UTM/query parameters added to the URL from paid search traffic, but you want the experiment to run regardless of which campaign a visitor comes from.

To set it up:

1. Identify the two specific URLs you want to test and how they differ from other landing page URLs on your domain.

2. In URL Targeting, select Simple match from the dropdown and add the URL of the first landing page.

3. Click the “+” icon and add the URL of the second landing page as a Simple match.

Because a simple match ignores anything to the right of the question mark in the URL (all query string parameters), this set-up ensures the experiment will run only if a visitor lands on the first landing page URL or the second landing page URL.

Simple match may also be handy for excluding certain URLs from a substring match that targets many pages at once.

In these examples, those that includewww.example.com/ignorethispage are excluded because the targeting is set to exclude that URL as a simple match.

Exact match

Exact match will run an experiment only when users load the exact URL.

Like simple match, exact match ignores trailing slashes at the end of your URL, http/https protocols, and www. Also like simple match, exact match doesn’t ignore subdirectories, extensions, or changes in subdomains (www.example.com vs blog.example.com or www.example.com/blog).

Unlike simple match, exact match doesn’t ignore changes to query or hash parameters.

Enter a full URL when using exact match—the absolute URL, not a relative URL like /products/general.html.

In this example, www.example.com, http://example.com/, https://www.example.com would be included because exact match accepts these common variations.

These URLs would be excluded:

• http://www.example.com/?query=true , because it includes a query parameter.

• http://www.example.com/blog/, because it's not the same subdirectory.

• http://blog.example.com, because it's not the same subdomain.

If you specify a query or hash parameter, exact match allows only that exact parameter into the experiment.

Exact match may come in handy when you want to exclude specific query or hash parameters from a simple match.

Substring match

Substring match runs an experiment when the URL contains a set of characters that you specify. This set of characters is called a substring and can be present anywhere in the URL. 

For example, if you want to target an element on all product pages, look for a part of your URL that is consistent across all product pages. If the substring '/products' is in every product page, run a substring match on '/products'. 

Substring match ignores trailing slashes that appear at the end of your URL and http/https protocols, but it doesn't ignore subdomains (including 'www'), subdirectories, extensions, or changes to query or hash parameters.

Unlike simple and exact match, substring match doesn't need a full URL to match. You can substring-match on a word, query parameter, subdirectory, or any other substring that might appear somewhere in the URL. This makes substring match ideal for targeting entire categories of pages or your entire site (for example, to make a change to your global navigation menu).

Here's how a substring match targets the experiment when you include www (or another subdomain):

In this example, only the URLs that include the string www.example.com are included.

But when you remove the subdomain or 'www', the substring match targets any page on your domain where the snippet is implemented:

You can target an entire category of pages by including the directory that appears in their URL:

In this example, all strings that include the stringhatsare included.

With substring match, you can also target a certain parameter anywhere it appears:

In this example, all the strings that include the string utm_campaign=springpromo are included.

Example: Testing on categories of pages

You want to run an experiment on all product detail pages, but you want to be sure that your changes do not also show up on other pages of the site. You know that all product detail page URLs look similar (for example, http://www.example.com/us/product/...cket?p=84673-0, where everything after “product” is dynamic).

To set it up:

1. Identify a common URL structure for all of your product pages that is unique to those pages.

2. In URL Targeting, select Substring match from the dropdown and enter the portion of the URL that is guaranteed to be the same across the desired set of pages (for example, example.com/us/product).

This ensures that the experiment will run on any URL that has the string example.com/us/product in the full URL. The substring match will apply even if values are added before or after this string.

Example: Run site-wide, except for a certain subset of pages

You want to run a site-wide navigation bar change across all the main pages on your site. However, a subset of “news” pages do not follow your site’s standard layout, so you want to exclude these “news” pages from the experiment.

You know that the “news” pages all have a URL that begins with http://www.example.com/news. The dynamic topic and article name are appended after “news/”.

For example, a full URL might be: http://www.example.com/news/home-imp...ment-projects/

To set it up:

1. Start with the bigger group of pages that you do want to include in the experiment. In this case, set a substring match to www.example.com to ensure the experiment runs site-wide.

2. Identify a common URL structure for all of the pages that should be excluded from the experiment.

3. In URL Targeting, add another condition and select Substring match from the dropdown menu. Enter the portion of the URL that is guaranteed to be the same across the set of pages you want to exclude (in this example, www.example.com/news works).

The experiment will run on pages on your domain that have the substring www.example.com, but not pages that have the string www.example.com/news.

When you exclude URLs in URL Targeting, both positive and negative conditions must be met. In other words, to be included in the experiment, a visitor must land on a page that matches the included condition and does not match the excluded condition.

Regular expression match

Expert users can use regular expressions ("RegEx") to specify a set of pages on which an experiment should run. For example, to target all pages on your site where the snippet is implemented, use a regular expression match and enter .* as your match condition.

It's impossible to cover all of the different possibilities that regular expressions allows, but we'll provide a small sample.

Let's say you want to target your experiment to pages in your /products/shoes, /products/hats, and /products/shirts sections, but no others. You might write a regular expression that looks like this: /products/(shoes|hats|shirts).*

Regular expression matches are evaluated using JavaScript's built-in regular RegExp module. Your expression is matched against the full page URL and will be evaluated as a substring match up until an escaped character in your expression. Alternatively, you could write the regular expression in this example entirely in RegEx:\/products\/shoes|hats|shirts.*

Your expression does not need to match the full URL to trigger your experiment using Optimizely. For example, the regular expression 'x=y' will match the following pages:

• http://www.example.com/blog/january?x=y
• https://example.com/blog/january?a=b&x=y&c=d

Query parameters

When we evaluate a URL using the RegEx match type, Optimizely strips the Optimizely query parameters. For example, if you’re trying to create a RegEx to match http://www.example.com, the added Optimizely query parameters might look like this:

http://www.example.com/?optimizely_token=b0a1ff184499db5eba13276b436f7a9c04422c85ed08ac7cb83b8214768b37be&optimizely_x=7961690747&optimizely_x_audiences=&optimizely_preview_layer_ids=7597420149&optimizely_snippet=s3-7428110562&optimizely_preview_mode_CAMPAIGN=7597420149

The stripped URL we evaluate would be http://www.example.com/?. Optimizely doesn't remove the /? when stripping the Optimizely query parameters due to inconsistent behavior among browsers.

To match the URL http://www.example.com, you may want to include matching for the trailing /?. You could use example\.com\/?\??$ to match with and without the trailing forward slash and question mark and to not match if there’s an actual query parameter in the URL, like a UTM campaign.