Referrers: "https://googleads.g.doubleclick.net" and "https://syndicatedsearch.goog"

[skatofiabah]

Hi,

For these 2 referrers, "https://googleads.g.doubleclick.net" and "https://syndicatedsearch.goog", is there an easy way to distinguish what is paid search vs paid display for Google Ads? My research and understanding is without CIDs or UTMs, you can't just simply look at this referrer to say this one is Google Ads Display only and this is Google Search only. Let me know if it's otherwise. I'd love to be able to say "https://googleads.g.doubleclick.net" is strictly Google Display Ads and "https://syndicatedsearch.goog" is Google Paid Search Ads (if that's even true).

Thanks!

[Jennifer_Dungan]

From what I see, the sponsored ads in Google Search don't go through an Ad Server... they link directly to the site. Which means the referrer would be the Search Engine, not an ad server.

This is backed up by the fact that that "Paid Search Detection" looks at known search engines as the referrer, with the added campaign codes of a paid ad.

I would say that both of the mentioned referrers are straight up ads, through traditional ad servers. That neither one is coming from a Google Paid Search.

[skatofiabah]

Hi @Jennifer_Dungan,

So for our paid search and paid display campaigns from Google, we used gclids and CIDs (in place of UTMs) respectively. Does this mean the 2 referrers above aren't relevant? In other words, I can't explicitly say they are strictly paid display or paid search from google Ads? I'd only be able to do that with a query string (?) CID?

Also, what does an organic search referrer look like? Is it just "www.google.com"?

I'm using a tool called Crazy Egg to see a heat map of what users do and I need to know the referrer and what channel it is. What would be Organic Google Search, Paid Google Search, and Paid Google Display? I'm assuming maybe the 2 referrers I mention above are neither the latter 2 but maybe syndicate is organic? With Paid it all has to contain UTMs right?

[Jennifer_Dungan]

Hi @skatofiabah ,

First, sorry for the late reply.

As far as I can tell, 99% of my paid search comes directly from Google (google.com and google.ca)... I have my paid search detection set up to look for search engines with gclid or utm_medium matching one of our know values (paid, cpc, ppc). It shouldn't matter if you use CID or UTM really (almost 95% of our paid search is missing our UTMs... despite me telling that team multiple times to fix it...)

I have 0.2% coming from https://syndicatedsearch.goog (this being my top 3....)... 0.2% is so small, it barely registers. It looks like I don't have traffic coming from that domain for other uses... so I guess that one is probably safe to say "Paid Search", but it's really not going to catch the bulk of your paid search traffic.... As for https://googleads.g.doubleclick.net/ I would say this is 100% ads (big box, skyscraper, leaderboard, etc) and nothing related to paid search.

Both Organic and Paid Search are generally going to share the same referring domain... this is why Adobe has the Paid Search Detection settings per suite:

Adobe knows what referrers should be search engines, then you can specify what query parameters are being used on your paid search.

The referrals with the specified parameters will be grouped as "paid search", and everything else as "natural search"

If you are trying to use Crazy Egg (without access to your Adobe data), that might be a bit harder. I have never used it... and if you can only filter by referrer, you won't have enough detail to split that into Paid or Natural Search... (since it's the parameters in the URL of your first page that determines if it was paid or not....)