SearchEngineReferrerTracker

[marco]

Hi Folks,

I just added a small module that keeps track of search keywords encoded in http referrers from common search engines leading to your site.

See the README for a full documentation of features.

Please let me now, if you have found any issues, feature requests or opinions by leaving your comments here in the forum or on github.

Regards from Hanover, Germany,

    Marco

[Soma]

Looks nicely put together, thanks!

Make sure once its ready, to put it on modules.processwire.com.

Small notice:

$this->db->query($sql);

Will be deprecated at some point in near future. $this->database is the new one that uses PDO in PW now.

[teppo]

Will be deprecated at some point in near future. $this->database is the new one that uses PDO in PW now.

Minor clarification:

Since current master doesn't yet support PDO and according to Ryan 2.4 will be backwards compatible with earlier versions (thus supporting $db and MySQLi) "in near future" might be a bit of an overstatement here. If this module needs to work with current master (stable) branch of ProcessWire, $db is a requirement.

[marco]

The module is submitted to the module store at modules.processwire.com and waiting fpor approval.

As for the $this->db vs. $this->database issue: I'll will update this accordingly to meet the needs of future releases as soon as it becomes necessary.

[teppo]

Probably should've mentioned in my last post that it's, of course, possible to support both $db and $database simultaneously. Ryan posted an example of this in the first post of the thread linked above. That would make sure that your module works now and in the future releases, though I must admit that I still haven't added this to any of my own modules either..

Oh, and by the way: this module seems very useful. Had a quick look and so far I'm liking it very much

[Anssi]

This looks very nice but some issues have come up:

Only Bing and Ask searches seem to be tracked properly. I didn't get any keyword data from Google and Yahoo, quite possibly because in these cases the referring URLs don't contain any keyword parameters at all.

I don't know if this is a country specific issue or what but on my searches the links in Google and Yahoo search results are redirects where all keyword information is removed.

Also when ProCache is turned on no tracking info is recorded.

[teppo]

@Anssi: sounds like an issue with secure connection. Google is using HTTPS for all search results and RFC 2616 clearly states that when going from HTTPS to HTTP referer header should not be preserved:

Clients SHOULD NOT include a Referer header field in a (non-secure) HTTP request if the referring page was transferred with a secure protocol.

One exception to this is referer meta tag, which Google is actually using to provide some basic referer information for browsers that support this -- namely the domain that a request originated from. There's not much information you can get out of that, though

Simple test: open dev tools, switch to net panel (or whatever it's called in your particular flavour of tools), set up filter (if available) to only show documents, enable "sticky" logging ("Preserve Log upon Navigation" in Chrome) and click any Google search results. Only the originating domain should be included with request headers.

[ryan]

Not even Google Analytics reveals the vast majority of phrases used to arrive at your site. My understanding is that technically it may be for https, but strategy wise they are doing it to increase search relevance by keeping all of us more focused on content than keywords. Source (see section "100% not provided")

Also when ProCache is turned on no tracking info is recorded.

This should be expected, as no PHP is executed on a ProCache request.