Marketers always keep experimenting with their websites to know what changes actually perform better and convert more visitors.


If the changes implemented in the website is a major one, it might be too risky for the marketers to go live as the new change might not be appealing to a group of visitors. One can always test both the original and the variation using the pattern type match to target a whole domain and then determine which variation performs better.


Consider a use case where an E-commerce website (www.example.com) have created a cosmetic change to the original content and have a different domain (www.example1.com) given to it and want certain traffic to view the variation.


To target the whole domain and its subdirectories, the pattern would be www.example.com*

And the variation URL to be provided would be www.example1.com*


So a visitor who visits a certain page (www.example.com/products/bags), he would be redirected to www.example1.com (Variation home page) and not to (www.example1.com/products/bags) which is not the desired outcome. To prevent this, Freshmarketer provides an option to redirect by considering the subcategories as well.


Provided below are steps to take to ensure that visitors are directed to the right variation URL.

  • From the Freshmarketer dashboard or from the chrome extension, create a new Split URL test. Provide a name to the experiment for your reference and select ‘Pattern’ as the URL targeting type to provide a regex pattern.

  • Once the regex pattern is entered, Freshmarketer identifies it as ‘variable1’. Please consider the below screenshot for checking the same.


  • In the variation1 text field, enter the variation URL where the visitor needs to be redirected to.



  • After typing the URL, the ‘variable1’ would be displayed below the text field. Hit enter and the variable one should be included inside the text field as shown below.



  • To ensure that the ‘variable1’ is considered, please navigate to the ‘preflight’ tab and make sure it is visible in the Variation1 after the domain.


You have made sure that now certain traffic would see the variation URL considering the subdirectories as well.

Make sure that our Freshmarketer snippet is integrated into all the URLs considered.

If everything is checked, launch the experiment.