Regex (Regular Expressions) is an immensely powerful tool to search in text, and can be used to create goals and filters quickly without adding too many and/or blocks.
For example, you’re looking for UTM Campaigns that either include “_brand_” in the middle of the text, or “_brand” at the end of the text, or “brand_” in the beginning of the text. If you were to do a ‘contains “brand_”’, this would also match “nonbrand_”, which you definitely don’t want. In this case, you would do “matches regex /_brand_|^brand_|_brand$/” to get the correct filter.
I know this looks really complex, but don’t get discouraged — it’s actually pretty easy! Let’s break it down.
- Every Regex would start and end with
/. This denotes that this is Regex and it’s not just some random text. - The
|symbol means “OR”. You can think of this as a replacement for,when saying “contains one of”
So, if you want to create a filter that says “Deal Type contains one of Renewal, Upsell, Cross-Sell”, your regex would be: /Renewal|Upsell|Cross-Sell/
- The
^symbol means this is the beginning of the text. - The
$symbol means this is the end of the text.
So if you want to create a filter that says “UTM Campaign is empty”, your regex would be /^$/ . You want to match, the beginning of the sentence, and the end of the sentence, with no text in between, which means it is empty!
- The
.symbol matches any character. - The regex for “is not empty” would be
/./ \dmatches any number- If you use any of the above characters in your match, you should preface it with
\to say that “this is not a special character. this is just the text I want to match.” For example, a UTM Campaign containing “|” would have to be matched like this:/\|/ - Regex in HockeyStack is case sensitive.
You can use regex101.com to test your regex. (You can omit the / when testing here)