Tracking PPC Search Phrases

[watcher]

TD has the neat keyword report that lets you see the keywords that are converting for PPC campaigns.

I want to do a similar thing with other networks that don't have keyword tracking so it looks like I will have to set something up manually.

By extracting the search phrase frm the referring engine and passing this through the "click reference" parameter of the tracking URL (available on most networks under different names) I will be able to see which search phrases are converting.

The question I have is - in PHP what is the best way to get a hold of the search phrase from a referring search engine (primarily Google Adwords) ?

Thanks.

Keith.

[ianm]

PHP Code:

getenv('HTTP_REFERER') 


Will return the URL of the site that referred the visitor to you.

You'll then need to parse the URL that you get from it to firstly work out if its a search engine (and if so which one) and then to extract the keywords from the URL.

[watcher]

Thanks for that ianm.

For a referral from Google Adwords does anyone know the format of the query string ?

[watcher]

It's OK I've answered my own question !

I thought that a referral from Adwords was of a different format to a referral from normal SERPs - it isn't.

[Rich]

Here is some code I use as part of a script to highlight search terms on pages

PHP Code:

$from_serp=false;
$engines = array (
    array ('google\.', 'p|q', 'Google'),
    array ('yahoo\.', 'p|q', 'Yahoo'),
    array ('search\.aol\.co','query','AOL'),
    array ('search\.dogpile\.com','q','Dogpile')

);
while ((list(, $engine) = each ($engines)) && $from_serp==false) {
    $regex="/http:\/\/[^\/]*".$engine[0].".*[?&](".$engine[1].")=([^?&]*)[?&]?/";
    if (preg_match($regex,$_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER'],$serp_matches)) {
        $from_serp=true;
        $serp_source=$engine[2];
        $serp_search=$serp_matches[2];
    }
} 


If you put that at the top of your redirect script it will extract the search engine used ($serp_source) and the query used ($serp_search). You can use those to create your tracking ID. $from_serp will be false if it doesn't recognise the seach engine.

The array at the top contains an array for each search engine. The first value is something unique about the domain name to recognise that search engine - this is used in a regular expression, so full-stops need to be escaped to \.
The second value is a list of url parameter names that may contain the search query - | is the regular expression 'or' character; e.g. google normally uses q, but sometimes uses p.
The third value is just the name of this engine, which the $serp_source variable will be set to.

Using this format makes it a bit simpler to add or modify search engine details.

[watcher]

Nice code fragment Rich,

Thanks.

Added:

Shouldn't that code fragment be put in the Affiliate University - it is very useful.

[Rich]

I just checked back and that code was my own work, so anyones free to use it as they wish. I created it to supply query terms to this php highligher script.