Target URLs to choose where your experiment runs

Choose the URLs for an experiment or campaign to determine where it runs on your site. You also can use the URL match types available in Optimizely Experimentation or Optimizely Personalization to target a specific URL or a group of URLs.

Ensure the Optimizely snippetOptimizely snippet is implemented on all pages you target.

Expand Test URL(s) to check your targeting conditions and ensure that your experiment runs on the expected pages. Test URL(s) determines that an experiment will run if the entered sample URLs match the URL targeting conditions. A non-match means the experiment will not run.

Test URL(s) confirms whether a URL targeting condition or pageview goalpageview goal correctly targets your intended URLs. Click Add (+) to add a URL to validate. Try checking for URLs that you expect and do not expect to match in your experiment or campaign.

Enter the URL you want to use and add URL match specifications that tell Optimizely where the experiment or campaign should run.

You can use one of the following URL match types:

Simple match is ideal for running experiments and campaigns on single pages. A simple match runs when visitors land on a URL, even if it has the following variations:

Simple match ignores these changes (because they usually do not change the way your page displays) and runs your experiment and campaign 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. The following examples show common variants that pass a simple match:

These examples match because they run on the same page as the original URL and adding query (?) or hash (#) parameters does not generally change the page.

Simple match does not ignore changes in subdomain (aside from www), adding .html or other extensions, or adding or changing subdirectories.

The following examples will not pass a simple match:

These examples will not match the original URL because they are not the same page:

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 is: www.atticandbutton.us/myaccount?account_id=1234&location=san_francisco

To set it up:

This setup ensures that your experiment runs on 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 live landing pages, and you want to run an A/B test on only two of these pages. You know there are 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:

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

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

In these examples, those that include www.atticandbutton.us/about are excluded because the targeting is set to exclude that URL as a simple match.

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

Like simple match, exact match ignores trailing slashes at the end of your URL, http and https protocols, and www. Also, like simple match, exact match does not ignore subdirectories, extensions, or changes in subdomains (www.atticandbutton.us compared to blog.atticandbutton.us or www.atticandbutton.us/blog).

Unlike simple match, exact match does not 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.atticandbutton.us, http://atticandbutton.us/, and https://www.atticandbutton.us are included because exact match accepts these common variations.

The following URLs are excluded:

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

Exact match may be useful when you want to exclude specific query or hash parameters from a simple 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 display at the end of your URL, and http and https protocols, but it does not ignore subdomains (including www), subdirectories, extensions, or changes to query or hash parameters. To match a substring that includes a trailing slash (if you have a page like /example and need to match /ex/ instead), use a regex match instead of substring.

Unlike simple and exact match, substring match does not need a full URL to match. You can substring-match on a word, query parameter, subdirectory, or any other substring that might display 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).

The following image shows 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.atticandbutton.us 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 displays in their URL:

In this example, all strings that include the string accessories are included.

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

In this example, all the URLs 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.atticandbutton.us/product/scarf?p=4673, where everything after product is dynamic).

To set it up:

This ensures that the experiment runs on any URL with the string atticandbutton.us/product in the full URL. The substring match applies 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 www.atticandbutton.us/news. The dynamic topic and article name are appended after news/.

For example, a full URL might be: www.atticandbutton.us/news/home-improvement-projects

To set it up:

The experiment runs on pages on your domain that have the substring www.atticandbutton.us, but not pages that have the string www.atticandbutton.us/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.

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

You cannot cover all of the possibilities that regular expressions allow. For example, suppose that 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 RegEx module. Your expression is matched against the full page URL and is 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. For example, the regular expression x=y will match the following pages:

Query parameters

When Optimizely evaluates a URL using the RegEx match type, Optimizely strips the Optimizely Experimentation query parameters. For example, if you are trying to create a RegEx to match http://www.atticandbutton.us, the added Optimizely Experimentation query parameters might look like this:

http://www.atticandbutton.us/? 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 Optimizely evaluates would be http://www.atticandbutton.us/?. Optimizely does not remove the /? when stripping the Optimizely Experimentation query parameters due to inconsistent behavior among browsers.

To match the URL http://www.atticandbutton.us, 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 is an actual query parameter in the URL, like a UTM campaign.