How to track direct URL referrer

Question

Most hosts come with softwares or google analytics which allows you to know how a person got to your site, for example: a link on yelp.com or a facebook.com page link.

But it is impossible for the software to know what method of marketing got a person to visit your site if he directly typed the url (those analytic softwares show them as "direct url").

I need a creative idea where I can refine this broad term "direct url".

One way would be to use flyers with QR codes (links to the website) but instead of the website itself I direct them to clickemart.ca/flyer1_referrer which in turn sends him to the website clickemart.ca but a different flyer distributed to a different location would have a QR code which can be scanned to direct a mobile user to clickemart.ca/flyer2_referrer

So my question is, is this possible, will I be able to figure out which flyer 1 or 2 was more effective based on visits to the redirect urls? If it is possible can you give me a brief idea on how to implement it?

I know a lot of you will say add a form field with "source of referrer" on the site but from my experience this is never filled or filled with incorrect values (typically the closest to the mouse pointer or the top most option or "other" - you get it, something useless).

Any help or guidance is really appreciated!

Answer 1

Solved it here is how:

1. Connect your site to Google Analytics (www.google.ca/analytics)
2. Create a campaign URL (support.google.com/analytics/answer/1033867?hl=en)
3. OPTIONAL: shorten the URL (www.bitly.com)
4. Create a QR code to the URL (www.qrstuff.com/)
5. Scan the QR code and watch it appear as a campaign referral under Google Analytics

Here is an explanation to the different steps:

1. Once you create an account on Google Analytics, you can connect the site by copying a PHP script or a JavaScript onto every page or in my case (magento) the user code can simply be connected through the configuration settings
2. The campaign URL adds information to the URL link of your website just like the current link on stackoverflow.com variables such as noredirect="..." contains info for your server to process, so using the campaign URL could be used as a tag to determine the source of the referral
3. Shortening the URL is recommended because the QR code becomes less dense and this in turn reduces the chance of error while scanning the code, the shortened URL links directly to the campaign URL link you provided so it is a seamless process
4. QRStuff is a good place to download the QR code image at a high resolution
5. So when you scan this is what happens:

CODE SCANNED >> PHONE COMMAND TO GO TO SHORTENED URL LINK >> REDIRECT TO CAMPAIGN URL >> GOOGLE ANALYTICS RECEIVES INFO ABOUT CAMPAIGN REFERRAL >> YOU CAN SEE IT BY LOGIN INTO GOOGLE ANALYTICS