Referrer Label

When a visitor is referred from another site, the web server records the URL they came from. Common examples include search engines, advertising campaigns, online articles, and partner sites. In many cases, these are the visitors who are most important to a commercial website, because they usually cost money to attract. The site owner will want to optimize the site design, layout, and content to appeal to these groups

Step 2: Choose how to match the referring page (the part of the URL up to the ? character).

Matches exactly: The page up to the ? character must exactly match the string entered. This is most often used with partner sites or advertising campaigns where the page part of the URL is predetermined and does not change according to individual visitors.

Contains the string: Most commonly used to label search engine queries where you are not concerned about the individual page referring the visitor. Labeling on google.com would label visitors from www.google.com/search and www.google.com/directory, as well as images.google.com, because all these pages contain the string "google.com." This example would not label visitors from www.google.de.

Matches any of: (v6.1) Use this to include multiple referrers in the label. Enter the strings that you want to match, one per line.

Matches the regular expression: (v6.1) Do a more sophisticated match by using a regular expression. To learn more about regular expressions, see http://aspn.activestate.com/ASPN/docs/Expect_for_Windows/1.0/regex.html.

When a visitor is referred from a search engine, the original search parameters are passed inside the referrer string. These parameters are placed after the ? character and take the form of "parameter name=value" with the & character between each pair. Try a couple searches and look at the resulting URLs to get a better feeling for how this works.

Restrict Label to Visitors with the Following Search Parameter: Once you define the referring domain you wish to label, you can refine the label to highlight only those visitors who searched on a particular criteria.

Parameter Name: Different search engines use different parameters to indicate the search string. A partial list of the parameter names currently in use is:

google	q
yahoo	p
altavista	q
lycos	query
search.aol.com	query

You can also label on search parameters independently of the specific search engine. See: Search Engine Query Labels

matches exactly: the contents of the specified parameter must match exactly the specified string, ignoring differences in case.

Note: Some sites pass referred visitors through a landing page to assist with database tracking. You can use this instead of referrer labels by labeling the visitors who have visited the landing page. See Visited Page Label.