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Can my page determine the organic search keyword?

I notice that Google Analytics shows the search term entered for an organic search. That is, when you go to Traffic Sources | Sources | Search | Organic and select Keyword as the primary dimension you can see the search term entered by the visitor. This tells me that Google probably stuck the keyword into the query string, and so I could pull it out of the query string also with, say, PHP, if I knew were it was. It doesn't seem to be in the normal Link tags: utm_source, utm_medium, utm_campaign, or utm_content. Does anyone know how I can get the keyword entered for a Google search that comes to me?

Thanks for any information.

Tony McCreath

It's from the referer parameter in the http header of requests to your pages.

It sometimes contains the URL of the page that sent a visitor to your page. Google Analytics can work out from that if it was from a search engine and what search term was used.

Google themselves have recently started blocking this information, so you may see a lot of
(not provided) results because of that.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP_referer

steva

ASKER

Thanks Tiggerito for the response.

You say,

[HTTP_referrer] sometimes contains the URL of the page that sent a visitor to your page. Google Analytics can work out from that if it was from a search engine and what search term was used.

I guess my question now is , how can I work out what the search term was?

ASKER CERTIFIED SOLUTION

Tony McCreath

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