What is URL starts with, Exact match and Simple match?
To get the right pages in your funnel, you have three options:
1. URL Starts with
2. Exact match
3. Simple match
URL Starts with
If you want all pages that start with a URL, all URLs after this will be included.
For example:
1. URL starts with: https://adline.com/ then all pages starting with this URL will be included.
2. URL starts with: https://adline.com/blog, then all pages starting with this URL will be included. Like both URLs https://adline.com/blog/advertising, https://adline.com/facebook, https://adline.com/sports, etc. All of these will be included. Traffic to https://adline.com/ will not be included.
Exact match
Only URLs that match exactly will be included.
For example:
The URL https://adline.com/, only traffic that matches exactly this URL will be included, not traffic to pages like https://adline.com/blog, https://adline.com/blog/advertising etc.
Simple match
Sometimes there is added information after the URL when the traffic comes from another source. Like advertising campaigns, email, etc. It is usually when using UTM parameters to track where the traffic comes from.
A URL can then be like this:
https://adline.com/?utm_term&utm_campaign=NO_Warm_Leads-Display&utm_source=adwords&utm_medium=ppc&hsa_acc=1855528243&hsa_cam=12904359083&hsa_grp=120385072534&hsa_ad=563871265631&hsa_src=d&hsa_tgt=aud-1023400653009&hsa_kw&hsa_mt&hsa_net=adwords&hsa_ver=3&gclid=EAIaIQobChMI78zL6KPL-QIVjNB3Ch2fUA_lEAEYASAAEgLQIPD_BwE
Yes it is long:)
If you select https://adline.com/ as "Exact match" it will not include the traffic from the URL above.
If you select "simple match" all URLs starting with "?" will be included.