How to manage overlaps and conflicts in your mapping

When you create or edit page groups in your mapping, you may find that some pages appear in more than one page group. This article explains how to identify and manage them based on your platform experience:

• The new Overlap Management experience (available with Sense Mapping and AI Terms accepted)
• The existing Conflict Management system (for users without AI Terms accepted).

Which experience do I have?

Your experience depends on whether you have access to the Sense Mapping features.

You have the new Overlap Management experience if:

• You've accepted AI Terms in Contentsquare
• You're using the Sense Mapping experience
  → Jump to Overlap Management section

You have the existing Conflict Management experience if:

• You haven't accepted AI Terms
• You see a conflict modal that blocks you from saving when page groups share URLs
  → Jump to Conflict Management section

How to view and manage overlaps (New Sense mapping experience)

Available for: DXA Growth, Pro, and Enterprise plans with AI Terms accepted

What are overlaps?

An overlap happens when the same page belongs to multiple page groups. 
Here is an example:

• Page Group A includes all pages containing /products/
• Page Group B includes all pages containing /products/sale/
• URLs like /products/sale/item123 would appear in both page groups: this is an overlap
   

Step One: Access a mapping

From the Mapping capability:

1. Navigate to 'Mappings'.

   
    

2. Enable the Sense mapping toggle (if not already enabled).

3. Click on your mapping.

   

From Journey Analysis or Page Comparator:

1. Select a mapping from the dropdown.

2. Click 'View mapping'.

   

    

From Zoning, Funnels or Session Replay:

• Filter and view page groups to see page group information.

  

Step two: Find and view overlaps

The steps vary depending on which capability you're using:

In Mapping, Journey Analysis, or Page Comparator:

1. Look for the overlap icon next to page group names.

   

2. Hover over the icon and click the pencil icon.

   

In Zoning, Funnels, or Session Replay:

1. Filter and view page groups.

2. Click the 'Overlaps' tab.

   

Step three: Review overlap details

Expand any section to view:

• The specific URLs that overlap between page groups
• The number of views for each URL

Step four: Resolve overlaps

Resolving overlaps is optional and depends on your analysis needs. Consider resolving when overlaps are inflating your metrics, you want clean journey paths, or you're comparing mutually exclusive page groups.

To resolve, exclude the overlapping pages from one of the page groups. This updates that page group's conditions live, without affecting the other.

In this example, Holiday Campaign Page and Homepage both include the / path. We want to keep / only in Homepage, so we'll exclude it from Holiday Campaign Page.

1. Tick the checkbox next to the overlapping page group (in this example, Homepage).
2. A confirmation message appears at the bottom: "Pages will no longer be included in '[your page group name]'."
3. Click Exclude

The page group conditions are updated live - the / pages are now only included in Homepage and the overlap is resolved.

How to manage page conflicts

Page conflicts happen when a single page is assigned to many page groups. This can cause incorrect data in tools like Journey Analysis or Page Comparator. To resolve these conflicts, follow these steps:

1. Group pages according to their templates. For example, group all product pages or category pages together. 

2. Ensure that a page is not included in more than one page group within the same mapping.

Handling page conflicts as they occur

To prevent conflicting grouping criteria, we’ve implemented a confirmation procedure when creating page groups. This means when a conflict occurs, you’ll be shown a message that some pages are already included in other page groups.

Clicking Exclude from all will move the conflicting page from its existing page group to the new one you’re creating. In a second step, you’ll be shown how many pages will be transferred from the existing page group to the new one you want to create.

As a result, the newly created page group will now include the page that was in conflict and the existing page group from which the page was transferred has an additional new criteria ‘does not match exactly’ the page in question. This action adds to the limit of 100 criteria for each page group.

Optimizing criteria

If you’ve reached the limit of 100 criteria per page group, it’s time to optimize. The criteria optimizer helps by reducing the number of complex criteria, such as unnecessary negative criteria that were added during conflict management.

Steps to optimize conditions

1. Click Analysis setup, then click the relevant Mapping Name.

2. Click the horizontal three-dot Actions menu, then select Info.

3. Click Optimise criteria, then confirm the optimization process.