# How do I tell organic search visitors apart from paid search in an audience?

Asked by Rhys Bowen on 2025-09-10. Tags: cql, audiences, campaigns, seo.

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?](/answers/cql-utm-campaign-audience)
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

### Accepted answer from Petra Kovacs (2025-09-11)

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:

```cql
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:

```cql
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.

#### Reply from Rhys Bowen (2025-09-11)

That asymmetry framing is exactly what I needed. Built both audiences and
verified them against tagged and untagged test visits. Diolch!

### Answer from miguel_s (2025-09-12)

Adding a pointer: the
[organic search playbook](https://blog.croct.com/post/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.