Google Analytics Reg Ex isn't tracking goal URL - regex

Question

Alright, i've played around with this for over a week now and I can't get it to work. Using a regular expression match:
My GOAL URL:
category=thanks
This is not tracking correctly
My only goal step:
/s.nl\?c=1025622&n=5&sc=[0-9]+&ext=T&add=[0-9]&whence=
This is tracking correctly but it is saying everybody exits on this step and does not go to my goal URL
Upon looking at pages that contain category=thanks, I found the following tracked URLs
/s.nl?c=1025622&sc=44&category=thanks&whence=&n=5
/s.nl?c=1025622&sc=44&category=thanks&n=5
/s.nl?c=1025622&sc=44&category=thanks&whence=&n=5&redirect_count=1&did_javascript_redirect=T
/s.nl?c=1025622&n=5&sc=44&category=thanks&it=A&login=T
along with a bunch of other containing category=thanks. As I obviously can't compensate for all these changing URL, I figured just having "category=thanks" would work, but apparently not?

Answer 1

Your category=thanks statement is not a regular expression that matches the URLs you mentioned. It would apply for filters and segments where there's a 'URI contains' option, but not a full match.
I beleive you have 2 options:
Go to Content report in GA, choose a larger time period (like a year) and add a category=thanks filter. You'll get all possible goal URLs. For them you'll have to write a regular expression. From what you describe, your URL structure is a mess (too many parametrs), so take a look at option 2.
Add a small script to your goal page that would redirect your visitors to a page with a clean url. Something like a conditional statement saying if (URL contains category=thanks) {redirect to /thankyou.html}, then use this thankyou.html as a goal in GA.