identifying paid vs organic visitors from Google

Question

I am trying to create a mini analytics, and identifying where the visitors came from.

I am using $_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER'] to find out where each visitor came from, but I am struggling to find out if they came from Google Adwords or Organic.

Is there some trick to this? Is $_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER'] even the correct way to go about this?

Also if anyone knows how to do the same for yahoo and bing, then that sure would be handy too.

you will never know what any degree of accuracy ... adwords api - raw stats = organic. — , Jul 04 '16 at 04:04
I think it may be possible to access the cookie google places on the visitor and view the referral information in there. Not sure how to though. — Jack Queen, Jul 04 '16 at 04:10
so if a visitors comes from adwords or organic the HTTP_REFERER will still be https://www.google.com — Source, Jul 04 '16 at 04:25

Kemen Paulos Plaza · Answer 1 · 2016-07-05T09:36:01.910

It's not possible to do it only with the HTTP's refereral, because the HTTPS protocol and Google deletes the URL parameters. Also, not so easy as you think, because there is a lot of variations to take in consideration (for example new.google.com, or Google.com)

Google Analytics mixes the referer pages and the UTM_parameters (Gclid is also included). I recomend you take a look of this document for more information https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/6205762?hl=en

But, I leave you a mini script that can help you, but it works only to detect the Google.

<?php
function detectCampaing()
{
   $ret = false;
   if(isset($_GET["gclid"])){ $ret = true;}
   if(isset($_GET["utm_source"])){ $ret = true;}
   if(isset($_GET["utm_medium"])){ $ret = true;}
   if(isset($_GET["utm_campaign"])){ $ret = true;}
    return $ret;
}


if(detectCampaing() == true ||strpos($_SERVER["HTTP_REFERER"], 'google') !== false){echo  "is campaign";}else{echo "is not a campaign";}
?>

identifying paid vs organic visitors from Google

1 Answers1