Stupid newbie question

Did I pay for this?

[john1533]

Hello. I am just starting to pay attention to my web logs. My question is: Say I get natural search visitors from google and I also run an adwords campain that targets the same keyword. Does the reffering URL look different in my log?

[ChadSEO]

john1533,

I believe they are the same, although I have never actually tested this. One way to differenciate between paid and organic would be to add a URL paramter to your paid URL, such as: http://www.example.com/product.html?keycode=GOOG

99% of the time, the page will ignore the extra parameter, but it should show up in your logs:

XX.XX.XX.XX- - [12/Aug/2005:13:31:55 -0600] "GET /index.html?keycode=GOOG HTTP/1.1" 200 5016 "-" "Mozilla/5.0"

Chad

[larryn]

John,

I'd add to what Chad said in that be sure to uniquely identify each keyword you purchase. At Overture, they will automatically (if you enable it) tack on three query fields to your provided landing page URL: one tell you the keyword you bid on; one tells you the type of match; and the third tells the raw search. Like this:

/index.html?OVRAW=web%20log%20analyzer%20software&OVKEY=web%20log%20analyzer%20software&OVMTC=standard

At Google, we added a field for the campaign name (category), and the keywords in that campaign:

/index.html?ref=google103&cmp=apache+log

Hope this clears things up for you, feel free to ask away if you have more questions,

Larry

[john1533]

Perfect. Thank you very much!