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How to Use Regex in Google Analytics

Cody Schneider••8 min read

Tired of setting up ridiculously long filters in Google Analytics with dozens of "OR" conditions? There’s a much smarter way to work with your data. By learning a few simple commands, you can create powerful, flexible custom reports, filters, and segments that tame your messy data and give you clearer insights. This is all possible with something called regular expressions, or "Regex" for short. We'll show you what it is, why it's a huge time-saver in GA, and provide practical, copy-and-paste examples you can start using today.

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What is Regex, Anyway?

Think of regular expressions as a find-and-replace feature on steroids. It's a special sequence of characters that defines a search pattern. Instead of looking for a specific, exact word or phrase, you tell Google Analytics to look for text that matches a certain rule or pattern you've defined.

For example, instead of filtering for Page path that perfectly matches /blog/post-1/ OR /blog/post-2/ OR /blog/post-3/, you could use a single Regex expression that says, "Show me all pages that start with /blog/." This lets you group, filter, and analyze your data in ways that would be impossibly tedious otherwise.

It might look a little technical at first, but you only need to know a handful of special characters to become remarkably effective with it.

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Why You Should Use Regex in Google Analytics

Getting comfortable with Regex unlocks a much deeper level of analysis inside Google Analytics. Once you start using it, you'll wonder how you ever managed without it. Here are the main benefits:

  • Simplify Your Filters: You can consolidate dozens of conditions into a single expression. This is perfect for filtering a report to show traffic from several marketing campaigns, social media sources, or multiple subdomains at once.
  • Create More Powerful Segments: Move beyond basic segments to group users based on more complex behaviors. For example, you can create a segment for users who visited any of your key landing pages, not just one specific URL.
  • Build More Flexible Conversion Events: Instead of creating different conversion events for multiple "thank you" or "order confirmation" pages, you can set up a single conversion event using a Regex pattern that matches all variations of your confirmation URL.
  • Clean Up and Consolidate Raw Data: Data is rarely perfect. You might have URLs with or without trailing slashes (/about vs. /about/), URLs with numerous tracking parameters, or slight variations in campaign names. Regex helps you group all these variations together to see the combined performance.

Your Regex Cheat Sheet for Google Analytics

These nine special characters will handle about 95% of what you need to do in Google Analytics. Get familiar with them, and you'll be building powerful filters in no time.

  • The '|' (Pipe) Character: Acts Like "OR" The pipe is the simplest and one of the most useful characters. It means "OR" and allows you to match one option from a list. Example: USA|Canada|Mexico will match traffic from any of those three countries.
  • The '.' (Period) Character: A Single-Character Wildcard The period matches any single character. It's helpful for when you have small variations in spelling or characters. Example: black.friday will match black-friday and black_friends.
  • The '.*' (Dot-Star) Combination: A Multi-Character Wildcard This is one of the most powerful combinations. It means "match any character, zero or more times." Essentially, it's a universal wildcard. Example: /promo/.* will match any page that starts with /promo/, like /promo/winter-sale and /promo/clearance?utm_source=email.
  • The '^' (Caret) Character: "Starts With" The caret signifies that your pattern must appear at the very beginning of the text. Example: ^/blog will match URLs like /blog/best-post-ever but will not match /store/blog-category.
  • The '$' (Dollar Sign) Character: "Ends With" The dollar sign signifies that the pattern must appear at the end of the text you're matching. Example: /contact/$ could be used to match the exact page /contact/ and not /contact/send-a-message. It’s great when you need to be precise.
  • The '?' (Question Mark) Character: Makes Something Optional The question mark makes the character right before it optional, meaning it can appear zero or one time. This is perfect for handling common typos or inconsistencies like trailing slashes. Example: /about/?$ will match both /about and /about/ (but nothing else, thanks to the dollar sign).
  • The '' (Backslash) Character: The Escape Character What if you need to search for a character that has a special meaning in Regex, like a period or question mark? The backslash "escapes" the special meaning and tells Regex to treat it as a literal character. Example: to match URLs from graphed.com and not graphedXcom, you'd use graphed\.com.
  • The '()' (Parentheses): Creates a Group Parentheses are used to group different parts of an expression together. They're often used with the pipe (|) character. Example: ^/(blog|articles)/ will match any URL that starts with either /blog/ or /articles/.
  • The '[]' (Brackets): Creates a Set of Characters Brackets let you match against a list or a range of characters. This is handy for finding numbered page paths. Example: /product-page-[1-5] would match page paths ending in 1, 2, 3, 4, or 5.

Putting It All Together: 5 Practical Regex Examples for Google Analytics

Seeing how Regex works in practice is the best way to learn. Here are five common scenarios where you can apply these rules in your GA4 reports and explorations.

1. Filter a Report to See Traffic From Multiple Countries

Goal: You want to create a report showing user data only for people from the United States, United Kingdom, and Canada. The Regex: ^(United States|United Kingdom|Canada)$

How to use it:

  1. Navigate to any standard report, like the Traffic acquisition analysis report.
  2. Click the Add filter + button at the top of the report.
  3. In the "Build filter" panel, set the Dimension to Country.
  4. Set the Match Type to Matches regex.
  5. Enter your Regex into the Value field and click Apply.

The ^ and $ combination here is a best practice. It ensures the whole country name matches exactly, preventing an accidental match of "United Arab Emirates."

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2. Consolidate All Branded Paid Search Campaigns

Goal: Your team runs several paid search campaigns for your brand name with case and spacing variations. You want to see their combined performance in one view. The Regex: (?i).*(brand|branded).*

How to use it:

  1. In a report, click Add filter +.
  2. Set the Dimension to Session manual campaign name or Session campaign name.
  3. Set the Match Type to Matches regex.
  4. Enter the Regex. The (?i) flag makes it case-insensitive. The .* captures instances where there are surrounding text/spaces, while (brand|branded) accounts for your specific keywords.

3. Create a Conversion Event for Viewing Any Product Page

Goal: You want to know when users visit any product detail page on your site. For this example, let's assume all your product page URLs follow the pattern yourwebsite.com/products/the-product-name. The Regex: ^/products/

How to use it in GA4:

  1. Go to Admin, then click Events under Data display.
  2. Click the Create event button and then Create.
  3. Name your new custom event (e.g., viewed_product_page).
  4. Under "Matching conditions," set the first parameter to event_name, the operator to equals, and the value to page_view.
  5. Click Add condition. Set the second parameter to page_location, the operator to matches regex, and enter your Regex: ^/products/.
  6. Click Create. GA4 will now log a new viewed_product_page event every time a user views a page URL that starts with /products/.

4. Exclude Company and Dev Traffic From Reports

Goal: You need to remove traffic from your company's own IP address ranges and all development subdomains from your analytics view to stop internal behavior from skewing your real user data. The Regex: (dev|staging|test)\.yourwebsite\.com

How to use it:

  1. You first want to use the IP address filter, but we also want that added layer of filtering out our development hostnames. Head to the Reports section. Add the “Hostname” primary dimension.
  2. Add a Filter. In the "Build filter" panel, set the condition as Exclude.
  3. Choose the dimension Hostname. And the match type Matches regex with the formula above.

This expression groups dev, staging, and test and looks for any of them followed by a literal dot (\.) and your domain name.

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5. Isolate Traffic Going to Specific Blog Categories

Goal: Your blog URLs are structured like /blog/category/post-title. You want to analyze user behavior for people reading about "Marketing" or "Sales". The Regex: ^/blog/(marketing|sales)/

How to use it:

  1. Go to a report, like Pages and Screens, and click Add filter +.
  2. Set the Dimension to Page path and screen class.
  3. Set the Match Type to Matches regex.
  4. Enter your Regex into the Value field and apply it. Your report will now only show data for posts in those two categories.

Final Thoughts

Regular expressions can seem confusing, but spending a little time learning the handful of common characters will dramatically improve your efficiency and analytical power within Google Analytics. It turns messy, inconsistent data into clean, actionable reports, giving you a truer understanding of what’s happening on your site.

Of course, mastering Regex solves one part of the problem - cleaning up data within one platform. But most marketing and sales teams still spend hours logging into Google Analytics, then Facebook Ads, then Shopify, then their CRM, just to piece together the full picture. We built Graphed to remove that friction completely. We connect to all your data sources so you can use simple, plain English to create dashboards and reports in seconds - without ever needing to write a single line of Regex or stitch together another spreadsheet again.

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