Tracking Direct Traffic Based Upon Previous Searches in GA

If a visitor searches in to my site and returns via direct traffic

[polishhill]

I have a site that sells very high priced items, and there is much comparison shopping. 80% of my conversions are coming from direct traffic, though I know that most of these conversions originated with a previous search in to my site.

I want to place a cookie on visitor's computer that stores the search term used to originally search in to the site, and then integrate that in to my google analytics tracking in some way so that I can track initial search term on direct traffic / return visitor conversions.

I was thinking that i could pass the KW as a string in the conversion url, but is there a way to get GA to report this? Or is there a better way of doing this?

Thanks for your help!

Jake

[ogletree]

Have you tried the funnel feature in GA?

[polishhill]

Yeah, I have thought about it, but I don't see how this would help since it is direct traffic. Please elaborate on your idea. Right now I am exploring GA link tagging features as a possible solution. Any thoughts on that?

[ogletree]

I have never used GA for this. I might go play with it a little. You may just have to create your own script to do this.

[Skardhamar]

Maybe you could set a custom variable, that'll pass the original search term to GA.

pageTracker._setVar('original+search+term');

You're then able to segment the data by this.