What do the different rule types mean?

When configuring a heatmap or a session recording, you would be able to see several “Target Page” conditions in a dropdown which will help you to match the Target page where you would like the feature to be activated. Have you ever wondered what those conditions mean and how it exactly matches the Target page, we will cover that in this FAQ.

It is possible to add one or multiple rules to track your webpage(s) in a Heatmap or Session recording. There are three parts in matching a Target Page

• On what basis a Target page is getting matched a “URL”, “Path” or “URL Parameter”?
• What is the condition? for example: equals simple
• What is the value you would like to match to target a page? for example: “URL” https://www.example.com, “Path”/blog/2017/01/ or “URL Parameter”?page=1&limit=10

Now you can select how your expected value should be matched. You have various options, for example:

• equals simple – will only compare the URL provided in the configuration, it will ignore the protocol http or https, query parameters, a sub domain www and all query parameters &limit=10. If your page uses HTTP and HTTPS, or if you have the same page available under different URL parameters and you want to match all of them, this is typically a good choice.

• equals exactly – In this case the rule will be only activated when the visited URL is exactly what is present in the value of the configuration. For example: If the URL present in the configuration is https://www.example.com/blog/2017/01/?page=1&limit=10. Even a minor change in the URL will not be matched.

• contains – This condition allows you to test whether the URL or path contains a certain value. If you wanted to match for example all blog pages for the year 2017, you could define a rule where the URL or path contains blog/2017.

• starts with – When you select this condition, the URL has to start with this value. For example, you may want to match all URLs that start with https://www.example.com/blog/. The URL should always start with the value, a minor change like http://www.example.com/blog/ (http instead of https) would not work.

• regular expression – Regular expressions give you the most flexibility but are also the most challenging ones. Regular expressions are usually defined by developers and allow you match a value in pretty much any way you want.

Note: All comparisons are performed case-insensitive. This means a value matches a rule no matter if the domain is written for example www.Example.com or www.example.com.

For all comparisons there is also their counterpart available that allows you to exclude a certain value. For example, you can make sure a certain value doesn’t start with a specific value by selecting “Not starts with”.

We know it can be challenging to coming up with these “rules” and often you can use multiple comparisons to achieve the same thing. To help you define these rules, our UI includes a tool to easily help you validate whether a certain rule actually does what you had in mind or not.