Custom Matches
Contents
Overview
Out of the box, Website Data supports filtering on over a thousand technologies. But sometimes that's just not enough and more specificity is needed to find the exact domain that you're looking for.
Custom Matches allow you to specify patterns for us to look for on each website. We'll automatically tag the websites that contain these patterns and you can easily search for these websites using search filters.
This can help you detect stores that use specific wording on their website (for instance, you could use Custom Matches to build a list of domains mentioning bitcoin or shipping discounts) or detect domains that are using a technology that we do not yet support.
Note: Custom Matches are only available on the Elite plan and above.
Creating A Custom Match
To create a Custom Match, navigate to the Custom Match page and click the "Add New Custom Match" button.
You'll be asked to provide the following information to define the Custom Match.
- Name: Used to identify the Custom Match within our UI.
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Scope: Defines which content the pattern matches against. Each pattern can have a different scope.
- Global matches the content of any page that we crawl on each site.
- Meta Description matches against meta description tag on the home page.
- Meta Keywords matches against meta keywords tag on the home page.
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Patterns: A pattern is the arbitrary text/code to look for on each website that we crawl. Multiple patterns can be added to
a single Custom Match and a website will match if any of the patterns are present. Patterns are case sensitive, so the pattern "example" will
not match "EXAMPLE".
- Note that each pattern can be configured with a Minimum value, which defaults to 1. If set to 1, a match is triggered if the pattern appears at least once on any page that we crawl on a website. Sometimes, this can lead to false positives if the pattern is a fairly common term. To improve accuracy in these cases, increase the minimum value so that the match is not triggered unless the pattern appears at least the minimum number of times on at least one page on the website.
Fill in the required details and click the "Save" button.
Changes to Custom Matches only take effect in the next weekly update (typically on Sunday nights Pacific Time). Since we crawl websites once a week, if a Custom Match is created on a Wednesday, we'll only have crawled about 50% of the websites in our database by the time the next weekly update is published (so you'll need to wait until the following weekly update for 100% coverage).