Tracking URL and Keyword in PHP

Aaron my programmer did confirm it will only work providing the user has cookies enabled... Rodney, the code you placed above, is that possible to do in PHP? This is the code we have running now:
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<?php
session_start();
if(!$_SESSION['referer'])
{

$URL = $_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER'];
//first see if the url contains google
if(($pos = strpos($URL, 'google'))||($pos = strpos($URL, 'msn'))||($pos = strpos($URL, 'bing')))
{
// get everything after the q=
$query=strstr($URL, "q=");

$array=explode('&', $query); // get rid of everything after the first &

foreach ($array as $param)
{
if ($param{0} == 'q') // its q, so it's either google or msn/bing
{
$word_string = substr($param, 2); // strip q=
}
}

$keywords = str_replace('"', '', urldecode($word_string)); //clean keywords, get rid of the + and quotes

$_SESSION['referer'] = $URL; // set the url in the session

if($keywords){ $_SESSION['keywords'] = $keywords; } // set the keywords in the session
}
elseif($pos = strpos($URL, 'yahoo'))
{
// get everything after the p=
$query=strstr($URL, "p=");

$array=explode('&', $query); // get rid of everything after the first &

foreach ($array as $param)
{
if ($param{0} == 'p') // its a p so its yahoo
{
$word_string = substr($param, 2); // strip the p=
}
}

$keywords = str_replace('"', '', urldecode($word_string)); //clean keywords, get rid of the + and quotes

$_SESSION['referer'] = $URL; // set the url in the session

if($keywords){ $_SESSION['keywords'] = $keywords; } // set the keywords in the session
}
else
{
//not one of the 3 search engines so just hold the URL
$_SESSION['referer'] = $URL;
}
}
?>

The way you programmer is doing, by using session cookies, is the preferred way. I would use a similar approach and would set a session cookie once a user visits your page and do subsequent checks to see if the session cookie was already created on the other pages he/she might visit. The session cookie would only be set if the referrer host contains the domain (or part of the domain) for the search engines that you are targeting and the respective keyword.

Regarding cookies, almost all browsers accepts *SESSION* cookies by default and security software often don't block it... but persistent cookies can be blocked by security software by default and/or by users.

Even if session cookies were blocked, there are other ways to keep track of the info - for example by appending the session id to the url or hide it in a form, but for this case I wouldn't do it because it can be very complex to implement it, depending on the way your web pages are created.

Tip: tell you programmer to check the "parse_url" and "parse_str" at php.net to parse the referrer url and the query string, as it might help to simplify the code.

Carlos

Hi,
Would love to hear an update on this.
Thanks,

That's exactly what a service like w3roi does,



but I'm not specifically referring to any site.

You might bid on the keyword "online dating", and the searcher typed in the phrase "online singles". Google might decide those are close enough to match if you have broad match enabled and show your ad.

So what you see in the "q" piece of the referrer will be "online singles" even though that doesn't appear anywhere in your AdWords account; the {keyword} would've given you "online dating" so you can properly match the referral to your bid.