Using Wildcard With Your Audiences

On some occasions, you may want to use one audience to capture a variety of pages with similar URLs. We provide a wildcard symbol (represented with an asterisk *) that you can use anywhere in an audience path to handle situations like this. Wildcards can be used in both "Path" and "Querystring" audience methods.

Let's look at a few examples to clarify how this works:

Example #1
You want one audience to track the following URLs:

• www.yoursite.com/store/shoes/mens
• www.yoursite.com/store/shoes/womens
• www.yoursite.com/store/shoes/kids

You could set the path of this audience to: /store/shoes/*

The asterisk used here will tell SharpSpring Ads to include any URL that contains /store/shoes/ so all three URLs would be tracked with this one audience.

Example #2
You want one audience to track only the men's and women's categories of your shoe store:

• www.yoursite.com/store/shoes/mens
• www.yoursite.com/store/shoes/womens

You could set the path of this audience to: /store/shoes/*mens

Using the wildcard in the middle of the URL string in this case will tell Perfect Audience to track any URL that begins with /store/shoes and ends with mens. This audience would track both the /mens and /womens URLs.

Example #3
You want one audience to track any category of your store (not just the shoes category) that also has a men's and women's category. 

• www.yoursite.com/store/shoes/mens
• www.yoursite.com/store/shoes/womens
• www.yoursite.com/store/shirts/mens
• www.yoursite.com/store/shirts/womens
• www.yoursite.com/store/pants/mens
• www.yoursite.com/store/pants/womens

You could set the path of this audience to: /store/*/*mens

Notice how we used two wildcards this time? You can use as many wildcards in a path as you need. This audience will track any URL that begins with /store/ and ends with mens. This would include every clothing category, and both the men's and women's categories.

Wildcards are a powerful way to track many URLs of your site in one audience, and they can be used in a variety of ways! Let us know if you have any specific questions about using Wildcards.