In several locations in BlueConic, you are asked to specify URLs:
- When configuring URL restrictions for a dialogue (Where tab) or listener
- When configuring a conversion URL for a dialogue (Why tab)
- When configuring URL rules for listeners
Dialogues Where and Why tab
For cases one and two, it is important to understand that your configured URL will actually be evaluated as a regular expression. This opens up a lot of possibilities, such as the use of wildcards. Below are some tips when configuring URLs for these cases.
- The configured URL is automatically prepended as well as appended with a wildcard.
- The wildcard syntax in a regular expression is .* as opposed to just "*".
- This means configuring '/news/economy/' will actually create a regular expression .*/news/economy/.* that will be used to match the current URL, thereby matching for 'https://www.taylor-news.com/news/economy/index.html'
- If you want to match a URL that contains '/news/<any subpath>/economy' you should use /news/.*/economy
- The use of the greedy quantifier "?" is not allowed. It will be escaped before evaluating the expression. However, you can use "?" for query string parameters.
- Use the start and end anchor characters, respectively the caret ("^") and the dollar sign ("$"), for exact URL matches or starts/ends with matches. If you want to match the specific URL "https://www.taylor-news.com/news/economy/" and no sub-paths you should use ^https://www.taylor-news.com/news/economy/$. If you want to match URLs that start with "https://www.taylor-news.com/news", enter ^https://www.taylor-news.com/news
- If you want to configure just the home page/root path (and no sub-pages), make sure you put a trailing forward slash at the end of your domain name. Even though the location bar of the browser will not show the trailing forward slash it is actually (technically) part of the location. Configure https://www.taylor-news.com/$ instead of https://www.taylor-news.com$ in this case. Note that in order to accommodate campaign tracking URLs and hashed URLs, a second rule for https://www.taylor-news.com/[#?] is needed.
Listener rules
Listener rules do not support the regular expression syntax shown above. You can however use the "*" as wildcard, and BlueConic will prepend and append wildcards to the configured URL. For example: /news/*/index will match a URL like https://www.taylor-news.com/news/44304254925/index.html