Wildcard URL Matching

Constant Contact's Lead Gen & CRM wildcard URL matching feature allows you to create triggers for page visits with changing URL extensions.

This article will detail how to utilize URL matching.

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Article Contents

• What is Wildcard Matching?
• Boundary Characters
• Wildcard Catch-All

Available With:

Trial	✓
Essential	✓
Advanced	✓
Ultimate	✓

Toolbar:

Automation

Users:

Administrators	✓
Company Managers	✓
Marketing Managers	✓
Sales Managers
Salespersons
Jr. Salespersons

What is Wildcard Matching?

In Lead Gen & CRM, when you create a page visit trigger, you can replace the extension parts of the URL with an asterisk (*), also known as a wildcard. By adding an asterisk, you are telling Lead Gen & CRM that you want the trigger to allow that portion of the URL to be variable. As an example, consider the following URL:

http://example.com/order-received/1234/?order_number=2345

The order-received and order_number portions are both URL extensions that will change every time a customer visits the transaction page. The rest of the URL will remain the same. When replacing the order-received and order_number extensions with an asterisk, the URL will appear as follows:

http://example.com/order-received/*/?order_number=* 

Boundary Characters

Boundary characters are characters that, when encountered in a search, stop the matching process. The boundary characters are as follows:

Consider the following example:

http://example.com/* 

This URL would match http://example.com/home, but would it not match http://example.com/home/john. This is because the forward-slash character occurring after the word home would prevent the wildcard from matching that particular URL extension.

Wildcard Catch-All

To include all variations of a URL beyond a certain point, you can utilize a double-asterisk (**) wildcard to indicate that any additional variations beyond the location of the wildcard are to be included in the rule. Consider the following example:

http://example.com/order-received/1234/?order_number=**

In this example, the parts of the URL before the double-asterisk will need to match. However, anything after the catch-all wildcard will be ignored. Catch-all wildcards are unlike the single-asterisk wildcards, which will respect boundary characters present in the URL.