Using Wildcards

A Summary item needs to exactly match an item in an alias group for it to be represented by the group. Defining your aliases can therefore be a time consuming task.

View example: If you are trying to alias all hits to your organization's web site, you need to add an item to your alias for every page, and every resource that belongs to your web site.

Fortunately, you can utilize 'wildcards' when adding items to alias groups (See Adding alias groups and items), to make the task of defining your aliases much easier.

A wildcard is a special character that represents information that is allowed to change from hit to hit.

Wildcard example: If you want to alias all hits to your company's web site, you can specify the item www.yourcompany.*. The asterisk character is the wildcard. It represents all information that follows www.yourcompany. Every page associated with your web site will therefore be associated with the alias you are defining.

There are two types of wildcard characters in Vantage Ultimate :

The asterisk character (*) You generally use the asterisk character in place of characters that you want to ignore. The asterisk can be used to represent many characters and is generally placed at the beginning or end of a phrase that you want included in the alias.

Asterisk wildcard example: @webspy.com represents all company email addresses at WebSpy Ltd. Anything that precedes @webspy.com is ignored. Alternatively, you could use @webspy.co* to include all company email addresses at both the webspy.com and webspy.co.uk domains.

The question mark character (?) The question mark character can be used to represent single characters that can change from hit to hit.

Question mark wildcard example: john?webspy can represent john@webspy, john.webspy, and john-webspy

Important: The use of wildcards can slow performance when browsing your data in Summaries and producing reports, especially when analyzing a large volume of data.

For Wildcards to function correctly, you must set the 'Use wildcard matching' option on the Alias' configuration dialog (see Configuring Aliases).