What are URL-Based Website Audiences
After connecting your site to RollWorks by placing the RollWorks Pixel on your website, we will start capturing your visitor data to turn into Website Audiences. A URL-based audience segments your website traffic based on the different pages your visitors browse.
Visitors will be added to the Website Audiences you define as soon as the RollWorks Pixel loads. If a visitor leaves your website before the Pixel loads, the visitor will not be added to your Website Audience. The most common reasons why a visitor is not added to a Website Audience are:
- The visitor leaves before the site loads and the pixel fires.
- The visitor leaves before they accept the cookie consent banner, so the pixel is unable to fire without consent. Learn more about the GDPR cookie consent banner here.
Who can access
Access to create a URL-based audiences is available with all RollWorks packages, including the Free Tier.
To find your current subscription, log in to RollWorks and navigate to Settings > Billing > Plans & Usage.
Create URL-based Website Audiences
- Login to RollWorks and navigate to Audiences > Website Audiences
- Select Create Website Audience
- Select Audience Type = URL Visited
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Enter the URL page that you want to track with this Audience:
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- Enter only the path, for example, /pricing
- Do not enter the main domain, for example, www.rollworks.com
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- Enter your desired Audience Name
- Enter your desired Audience Duration (in days) under How long to keep a person in this audience. If you aren't sure, learn more in our Audience Duration article.
- Only if this audience is a Conversion Audience, check the box labeled This is a conversion audience. If you aren't sure, learn more in our Conversion Audiences Guide.
- Click Create Audience
Multiple URLs
Go to this Composite Website Audience Guide to learn how to create Composite Audiences based on multiple URL-based Audiences. Before you start creating a Composite Audience, you will need to create each individual URL-based Audience following these steps above.
Using Wildcards
The larger your audience, the more we can optimize within it. Unless you have thousands of visitors coming to your website every day, we don't recommend using an individual URL to define your audience. Instead, you should use special characters called wildcards to help you define more general URL-based rules.
There are two wildcards used when building URL-based audiences that allow you to define a wider range of URLs.
* (the asterisk symbol) is a wildcard that stands for any amount of letters or characters in your URL.
| Phrase | Rule | Examples |
| d*g | This word starts with “d” and ends with “g”, but what comes in the middle could be any number of letters or characters | dog, doing, determining, d123@g |
| *og | The word could start with any number of letters or characters as long as it ends with “og” | dog, fog, blog, bullfrog, 123@og |
| do* | The word begins with "do", but can be followed by any number of letters or characters. | dog, donut, doing, don't, do123@ |
? (the question mark symbol) is a wildcard that stands for a single variable character. This is particularly helpful if you are not sure if a certain phrase or word appears in lowercase or uppercase, as URL audiences are case-sensitive.
| Phrase | Rule | Examples |
| d?g | This word starts with “d” and ends with “g”, and there is a single wildcard letter or character in the middle | dog, dig, dug |
| ?og | This word ends with "og", but can start with any single letter or character | dog, Dog, hog, Hog, @og |
| do? | This word begins with "do", but can end with any single letter or character | dog, dot, doT, do7 |
Using URL patterns
A URL pattern is a unique series of letters and characters that appears in the URLs of your site pages. Use your URL patterns when you're setting up your URL-based audience.
Example
URL: www.rollworks.com/category/section/page/
- If you create an audience with the URL pattern */category/section/page/, your audience will capture any traffic to that specific page.
- If you create an audience with the URL pattern: */category/*, your audience will capture any traffic to a page that contains the phrase “/category/”.
Troubleshooting
- Ensure that your RollWorks Pixel is active and fires on every page of your website. Your RollWorks Pixel can only detect activity on a page if it is active on that page. Learn more about how to troubleshoot your Pixel in this article.
- Verify your URL pattern is correct. Your RollWorks Pixel is case-sensitive and looks for an exact match, so check for capitalization and spelling differences that might throw off a match.
- Verify if the same URL-based rule is being tracked through two audiences. Could the page be matched to more than one of your defined audiences? If so, it's possible that one of your audiences is receiving all of the traffic that you intended to capture with the second.