Match Regex Targeting

Learn how to regex targeting on your Uprival account.

The “match Regex” is another UpRival exclusive. Regex stands for regular expression and allows you to serve ads based on a specific sequence of characters that define a search pattern. This new feature is a bit more technical and requires a basic knowledge of regex coding, but there are many free tools available to help you build and test a regular expression. The main benefit of this new feature is in targeting multiple internet service providers. Originally you would create a separate targeting profile for each ISP that you wanted to target. If you wanted to target for both upper case and lower case that would be two (or more) profiles for the same ISP. With “match Regex” you can have a single regex code that will target all of the ISP’s in a single expression. For example, the regex code “.*((C|c)omcast)|((A|a)(T|t)&(T|t)).*” will target ISP’s that contain Comcast or AT&T regardless of case. It will match comcast, Comcast, AT&T, At&t, AT&t, etc. This one code will match 10 different ISP combinations (plus any ISP that includes any of the 10 different combinations). Now instead of 10 different targeting profiles you can do the same thing with just one profile. This makes setting up multiple conditions easier.  It also makes setting up the inverse condition so much quicker. Simply use the exact same regex code and select the Inverse Condition option. With UpRival's Profile Template feature you can create a standard regex to use in all of your ads and ad groups.

Another use case is if you’re passing a demographic, like age, through Sub ID 1 and you want to set up ad targeting to a range of ages, for example 20-49 years old. The following regex code, ^[2-4][0-9]$, on Sub ID 1 would accomplish that.