identifying organic and paid trafic

how can I separate Google organic and paid trafic

[lolo92]

Hi

We're tracking some paid search campaigns (I'll talk only about Google), and want to track the organic trafic also.

The first step for me is so to identify "for sure" where the trafic is coming from, organic or paid search ?
I know I can use a special landing page to identiy paid requests, but for example Google Analytics give us the ability to separate paid and organic trafic. How do they do ? Are there special parameters in the referrer we can use ?

Thanks for the help !

[C7Mike]

Within Google Analytics > Traffic Sources > Search Engines, you can click to filter total, paid or un-paid search engine traffic.

[Receptional Andy]

Google Analytics give us the ability to separate paid and organic trafic. How do they do ? Are there special parameters in the referrer we can use ?

I believe you need to link your Adwords account to your Google analytics account to get Google Analytics to recognise paid search. So that you can also monitor traffic independently of Google, I find it useful to also use tracking URLs to identify paid search.

[lolo92]

thanks, but I do not want to use analytics on that, I just see that Analytics do that and I want to do the same thing...

So with some searchs, I think I should see of the referer url is starting with aclk=, meaning that's SEM, or if it's containing a "source" param (= "web" but should be any other values, I think) meaning that's SEO.

If someone has another clues, feel free to reply :)

[Receptional Andy]

The referrer is the same for both paid and unpaid search, lolo92. CLicking a paid link does not change the referrer.

The only way to accurately identify with a third party system is to "tag" paid search landing pages with additional parameters. Google can identify it without parameters because they handle the visitor in both cases.

[lolo92]

thanks Andy,

I also think the real accurate way is to tag the paid search landign pages.
However, I think taht this method can also work, since Google changed all their urls :

[google.fr...] for the paid search

[google.fr...] for the SEO.

so I think analyzing the referer "url" value is a good way to know : if it's starting with "aclk" it's paid search, otherwise it's natural ?

[Receptional Andy]

so I think analyzing the referer "url" value is a good way to know : if it's starting with "aclk" it's paid search, otherwise it's natural ?

This doesn't happen to all searchers though, so I wouldn't consider it reliable enough. From a spot check of a single website stats for yesterday, only 20% of Google referrers contained "url?". Your mileage may vary, of course.

Worse still, even if it was reliable, referrer checking will only be possible for those advertising purely on Google - no search network, no content network.

[lolo92]

ok thanks Andy