How do I tell organic search visitors apart from paid search in an audience?
I run SEO for a comparison site and want to greet organic Google arrivals with different messaging than paid clicks. Our paid traffic is fully tagged with UTMs, organic obviously carries nothing.
I have read through How do I build an audience from UTM parameters? and the campaign conditions make sense for the paid side. What I cannot work out is the organic side: since organic has no campaign data, what signal do I key off? Both arrive with google as the referrer, so referrer alone does not separate them.
Methodical answer appreciated, I would rather understand the model than copy-paste
2 answers
Paid arrivals carry campaign data, organic arrivals carry a search-engine referrer but no campaign. That asymmetry is your separator.
Paid is the easy half, since your ads are tagged:
campaign's medium is "cpc"or campaign's source is "google" if you key off source instead.
Organic is "google referrer AND no campaign". Both session's referrer and page's referrer are available (session-level is where the visit began, page-level is the current navigation), and not applies to the campaign clause:
session's referrer matches "google" and not campaign's medium is "cpc"Note the negation relies on your paid traffic being consistently tagged. Any untagged paid click looks organic to this condition, so the audience is only as clean as your UTM discipline. Sounds like yours is solid, so you are fine.
That asymmetry framing is exactly what I needed. Built both audiences and verified them against tagged and untagged test visits. Diolch!
Adding a pointer: the organic search playbook on the Croct blog covers this exact segmentation pattern end to end, including what to do with the organic segment once you have it. Worth a read since you mentioned wanting the full model rather than a snippet.