Hi Mike,

Great post, this is a topic that causes much confusion. One mistake that I see often is that users do not know that the 'match type' setting applies to the funnel steps AND the goal. I've seen people use a regular expression for the goal and an exact URL for the funnel steps. It's a very common mistake.

Keep up the good work,

Justin

All too true, Justin. Thanks for pointing this out.

This is something that always trips me up when creating goals.
Say I have these two almost identical looking Thank You page URLs:

https://my.site.com/ssl/travel/boat/trip.rvlx or https://ncl.site.com/ssl/travel/boat/trip.rvlx?

With the only difference being the sub-domain of each. If I am creating a goal and I want to count visits to both of these URL's as one since they are essentially the same page (just the URL is different), would I use regular expression as my match type and /trip.rvlx as the goal URL?

I understand exact and head match but regular expressions always get me!

Thanks

@Jesse: You can actually use head match for those two since the Request URI, which does not include the hostname, is the same for both pages. You should use Regular expressions if you want to match multiple pages that differ in the beginnning or middle of the Request URI, or if you want to include pages that end more than one way while excluding pages that end in other ways. Head match, however, will work just fine for the majority of situations.

Hmmm, I didn't realize you could use head match for that. I thought head match was used when you had dynamic pages and the id's or unique values in the request URI changed for the same page essentially. So in this case, since the hostnames are different, what would be my goal URL? /trip.rvlx?

Thanks for clearing this up! I love reading your blog.

Hey Jeremy,

Not sure if I submitted my follow-up comment or not but I was just wondering what my goal URL in the above example would be? I thought head matches were for dynamic URL's where the values changed in the request URI, but the page was the same.

Thanks

@Jesse:

Hey, I just thought I'd chime in on this one, as it can get pretty confusing. The most important thing to understand about match types is that none of them look at the hostname (domain name) - ever. Instead, the types only look at the page name, or the Request URI, as it appears in your Google Analytics reports.

This means that if you are including the hostnames in your reports or doing something to your pages with filters, you need to take that into account when creating goals.

So for your example, you could just use /ssl/travel/boat/trip.rvlx with a head match, but only if the hostnames don't appear in your Top Content report. Head Matches should always start at the beginning of the page name - so /trip.rvlx would not work here.

If you were using regular expression match, you would only use /ssl/travel/boat/trip\.rvlx - so it's not much different. As opposed to Head Match though, you could use /trip\.rvlx here, but you may end up matching things you don't want to if you're not careful.

An easy way to check a regular expression goal is to type the expression into the Search field of the Top Content report.

Again, if you are changing your page names with filters, then you've got to include those in your matches, and in this particular example, Regular Expressions would be the only way to do it, and you could simply use /trip\.rvlx, as long as it matched only the correct pages.

Hope that helps!

Thanks Shawn (and Jeremy)! You guys are a great help; keep up the great work.

Jesse