Firing a tag on certain pages in Google Tag Manager

Question

I am trying to create a regexp to fire a tag within Google Tag Manager on certain pages.

The issue I am having is that I do not want to fire this tag on URLs matching a querystring in them, since it is only a session identifier and I do not need the tag to fire on the pages that have a query string. These are basically duplicates and they do not need tracking in a 3rd party tracking program. I know how I could exclude them in GA, but I can't figure out how to do it for the third party tracking.

I'll detail the scenario below and what I have tried.

Example pages that come up in my URL report if I look in GA:

/page

/page/subpage?my-handsome-query-string&some-other-data

/page/subpage

/page/subpage/subsubpage

/page/?query-string-again

So what I want to do is to fire the tracking on pages that does NOT have the query string, and it is proving quite the issue.

If I put in ^/page.*[^\?] it just doesn't work. I guess I am completely using the negated character class all wrong? I can't get it working and would require some assistance on how to devise a better regexp.

Some other I tried were:

^/page/.* but this one only matched everything after /page/ but not /page.

I am not very good with regular expressions, so what I basically want to do is match /page, /page/subpage, /page/subpage/subpage etc, but not any URL that has a query string in it.

In GTM I can't create two rules that says "Include {{url path}} matching this" and "Exclude {{url path}} matching \?", so it all needs to be done within one regexp... And that totally got me at a loss.

Edit: Mike gave a good answer to solve my GTM part, but I am still interested in learning if it is possible to do above but with a single regex?

Answer 1

You can actually create two rules as you described.

In GTM, tags can have both Firing rules and Blocking rules. Blocking takes precedence. eg.

Firing rule:

{{url}} matches ^page/.*

Blocking rule:

{{url}} does not contain ?

Another option is to use a custom javascript macro. It is in the form of a function(){ } which can detect a query string value in window.location.search and return boolean. Then have a firing rule {{your custom fn}} equals 1.

You can also create a macro which uses the URL macro type and Query component type. The value is set to the query string without the leading ?. If the url was example.com?foo=bar this macro would contain foo=bar. Then simply add a firing rule {{query}} matches Regex ^$ or {{query}} does not contain something-that-will-never-be-in-the-url-to-avoid-regex