User messages on sites and subsites

You can publish user messages on sites and subsites. Privacy & messaging uses site matching to determine which of your messages to display on a specific site or subsite. The goal of this article is to help you make sure that your published messages are displayed on the correct site and/or subsite.

Publishing messages to sites and subsites

When you publish a user message on a site, the message is displayed on that site and all of its subsites.

Example

If you publish a message on example.com, it means that the message will also appear on the following subsites:

• example.com
• www.example.com
• abc.example.com
• def.example.com
• xyz.abc.example.com

How messages are matched to sites and subsites

If you publish different messages on a site and its subsites, Privacy & messaging will match each message to the most specific site/subsite.

Example

If you publish message A on example.com and message B on abc.example.com, then:

• Message A will display on example.com.
• Message A will display on www.example.com.
• Message B will display on abc.example.com.
• Message B will display on xyz.abc.example.com, because message B is published on a more-specific site (abc.example.com) than message A (example.com).

This is important for any properties of the site that affect the message, such as URL path inclusions and exclusions, the site's name or the site's image.

Example

Let's say you've set up the following:

• example.com has a path inclusion on /articles/.
• www.example.com does not have any path inclusions set.
• Message A is published to both example.com and www.example.com.

In this situation, users will see different behaviour based on whether or not they're visiting example.com or www.example.com:

• When users visit example.com, message A will only be displayed if the URL path is under /articles/.
• When users visit www.example.com, message A will be displayed on all paths, because Privacy & messaging will match the message to the more specific published-to site, and there is no path inclusion set on the site.

If you wanted the same site configurations to apply to example.com and www.example.com, you would only publish your message on example.com, and allow www.example.com to inherit its configurations.

Tip: You should only explicitly publish to your www subsite if you want different behaviour between your www subsite and the 'naked' domain.

Publishing different message types

It's important to note that publishing a message of any type to a site will affect the site matching process for all message types.

Example 1

If you publish a GDPR message (message A) on example.com, and publish an ad blocking recovery message (message B) on abc.example.com:

• Visitors to example.com will only ever see message A.
• Visitors to abc.example.com will only ever see message B.
• Visitors to xyz.abc.example.com will only ever see message B.

Example 2

if you publish a GDPR message (message C) on abc.example.com, and an ad blocking recovery message (message D) on example.com and abc.example.com:

• Visitors to abc.example.com will be eligible to see message C and message D over time.
• Visitors to example.com will only be eligible to see message D.