# Difference between "matches" and "is" in audience conditions?

Asked by Heidi Strand on 2025-09-22. Tags: cql, audiences.

I set up a condition for a landing page test:

```cql
session's landingPage is "first-purchase"
```

and it never matches, zero users in the estimator. The actual landing page is a
full path with the campaign slug in it so I suspect thats the problem. I saw
`matches` used in one of the docs examples and now I'm not sure which operator
I should be using where. Is `matches` a regex thing? Would love a rule of thumb
so I stop second-guessing every condition.

## 2 answers

### Answer from rowan_dev (2025-09-22)

`is` is exact equality, the whole value has to be identical. Your landing page
is something like `/lp/first-purchase-q3`, so comparing it to the string
`"first-purchase"` fails every time.

`matches` is substring/pattern matching, which is what you want here:

```cql
session's landingPage matches "first-purchase"
```

Same idea works elsewhere, e.g. `campaign's name matches "sale"` catches
"summer-sale", "flash-sale-2025" and so on. Rule of thumb: use `is` for values
you fully control (fixed paths, enum-like attributes), use `matches` when the
value is a longer string you only partially know.

#### Reply from Heidi Strand (2025-09-23)

That was it, switched to matches and the estimator lit up. The full path
had a trailing campaign id I forgot about.

### Answer from Petra Nowak (2025-09-23)

One more gotcha in the same family: CQL keywords are case-insensitive, but
string literals are case-sensitive. So `IS` and `is` are the same operator,
but `"Sale"` and `"sale"` are different values. If a condition mysteriously
misses some users, check the casing of the actual data first.

And when you find yourself chaining several exact comparisons with `or`, use
`is in` instead:

```cql
page's path is in ["/home", "/about"]
```

Shorter and easier to review.