Many bloggers and website owners like to greet visitors coming from specific websites with a tailored message. There are many plugins that will make this for you on WordPress, but a cool one that I came across recently is called Referrer Detector.
- 9 rules
- Del.icio.us and Delicious.com
- Digg
- Gizmodo
- Google Search
- Lifehacker
- Live Search
- TechCrunch
- Technograti
- TechRadar
- Yahoo Search
The plugin also comes with many customization options, including the ability to select if you want the message to be displayed before or after the posts (which is something I found problematic on related plugins).
Finally, there are many things that you could accomplish with this piece of code. For example, you could display an advertising box with AdSense just for the visitors coming via Google search, which would increase your CTR and remove the annoyance for loyal visitors at the same time.
About Daniel
Daniel Scocco is a programmer and entrepreneur located in São Paulo, Brazil. His first company, Online Profits, builds and manages websites in different niches. His second company, Kubic, specializes in developing mobile apps for the iOS and Android platforms.
Thx. Very good plugin.
I think that it’s exactly the sam as “WP Greet Box” EXACTLY the same
though it’s great plugin and i love it 🙂
Regards,
Firas
Nice plugin I’l try it on my blog with PPC, thx for a post.
Either Greet box or Referrer Detector, I do enjoy working with both, but switched to Greet box a couple of weeks back.
Cheers for the article, will have another look at WP referrer detector! 🙂
I absolutely love this plugin, it’s a great way to personalize 😉
@Thaya, Very nice that you implemented it so soon 🙂
Looks like a good plugins. We can also get data about refferal page by using sitemeter at sitemeter.com. I look that it is complete enough to see many data related to our visitor.
By the way, I have wrote about Address Resolution Protocol (ARP) Virus thay may you need to know about it. This virus is dangerous enough. You can read more here
To be fair, Referrer Detector version 2.1.1 fixes the security flaw. You guys should try it (and WP Greet Box) out to see what works best for you. Cheers!
WP Greet Box version 4.3 now has the feature @Shrihari commented about (detecting search terms and using those to perform site search). The search text is not customizable yet, but it will be in due time. Check it out!
Now I have to decide which plugin to choose: either Referrer Detector or WP Greet Box…
@Thaya,
Thats great 🙂 It saves me work..
@Daniel
I guess I snoozed on that one :). Anyhow this post is actually getting me some more WP Greet Box users so I can’t really complain too much :).
@Shrihari
The feature you are talking about was actually already suggested to me by Andrew Rickmann (from WP Fun). I’m planning to release WP Greet Box with that feature in the upcoming versions.
@Thaya, all you had to do was to send me an email about your plugin 🙂 . I had not heard about it before so.
Prettey smart tip. Will think about adding it.
This is an incredibly useful plugin. Not only can you show adsense ads to to Googlers, you can show CPM ads to loyal visitors. This opens a whole lot of opportunities and I can’t wait to start testing it.
not bad, downloaded! Thanks for sharing… I’m never surprised with the various types of plugins for WordPress I stumble upon these days. 🙂 Cheers
I was going to mention that this was a fork of WP Greet Box, but @LGR beat me to it. I reviewed WP Greet Box awhile back on my blog.
It’ll be interested to see how the two plugins improve.
Thanks so much for the great plugin recommendation.
I run several blogs and it will be nice to be able to tailor messages depending on the referrer.
Great idea for displaying AdSense code too.
Just installed this, and it is GOLD !!!! I can now personalize Google Searches from Australia. Go Aussies !!!!
Honestly, I am quite disappointed that my plugin hasn’t done better in the WordPress community. I am also even more shocked[upset] that Referrer Detector got the word out much quicker than WP Greet Box. I guess it really does matter “who” you knows in the blogging community.
I don’t want to sound biased, but as of right now (Referrer Detector version 2.1) I believe that WP Greet Box is hands-down better than Referrer Detector:
1. Referrer Detector has a security flaw in its administrative AJAX interface. I won’t say more, so hopefully people with Referrer Detector installed won’t get hacked.
2. WP Greet Box works with WPMU.
3. WP Greet Box has the ability to keep track of visitors, so the visitor referred from google will not keep getting the same greeting message if they have visited within the last X hours.
4. Exclusion rules have regular expressions support.
5. More solid default CSS.
The only pros referrer detector has on WP Greet Box are:
1. More default greeting messages
2. The ability to include WordPress attributes like url, title, author, category etc. into the greetings
Given the security flaw Referrer Detector, I wouldn’t even try it out on a production site until the fix comes.
That is a very cool plugin. I think I will have to use it.
This looks like a great plugin. Its got most of the sites covered. I can’t wait to get it running on my blog.
Thanks for sharing this. 🙂
“Finally, there are many things that you could accomplish with this piece of code. For example, you could display an advertising box with AdSense just for the visitors coming via Google search, which would increase your CTR and remove the annoyance for loyal visitors at the same time.”
I don’t think you can do that with Referrer Detector. It’s great for displaying custom messages, but I don’t think it can display php or anything in script tags…
For displaying ads only to a specific audience, I use Who Sees Ads.
Update: I promote a lot of my articles on MySpace in bulletin posts and with the MySpace Crossposter plugin which automatically makes a blog post linking to your WP article post. It took merely a minute to add a custom entry to this plugin to reflect incoming MySpace links. Please note, if you do this, you need to use the URL msplinks.com, not myspace.com since MySpace re-routes all their external links through that first URL. Additionally, I wanted a 48×48 icon of the MySpace logo to put in there and found this page of CC icons, already sized and match perfectly! There are a few dozen icons here if you want / need to add a few more to your site:
Installed, configured and working! I went in and edited all the fields that had RSS to include my feedburner URL instead, even though I have the plugin that would convert them anyway, it only took a minute.
For everyone else, don’t forget you HAVE to edit the Twitter page to input your Twitter name, no way this plugin would know that.
Really kinda stoked on this one, since I get a lot of traffic from SU, hopefully it will help get the thumbs up even more. I will also be playing closer attention to my stats pages to see if I need to create anymore custom entries. Great plugin!
Wow, this is pretty cool. Should definitely help increase my CTR, thanks!
Just noticed that LGR said he same thing as I did in my comment above
It is the same as Greet Box by Thaya Kareseen of
Actually, i thought of creating a plugin along the lines of this one.
But, what i actually wanted was, for visitors from Google, it will display a message in the following format :
“Welcome Googler.. You can here searching for _______. This blog is about _____. Click here to search this blog for _____.”
That would be more welcoming for a searcher.
If such a plugin is already available, please let me know. Or i’ll be creating one 🙂
Awesome plugin, bookmarked! Great way to increase the CTR as you suggested!
Daniel,
Great plugin Really.
Installed and added one entry for DBT Readers 🙂
Wow this sounds really promising… thanks for the heads-up! I have downloaded and will experiment with it a bit later!
Just as usual. Great pluigns. Thank you, Daniel! I’m gonna install it in a few moments. 🙂
This can be an absolutely great plugin for traffic generation, we can request digg readers for a ‘digg’ and stumble upon traffic for a thumbs up..etc, not only it will make more sense, it will also be more effective. This is blogging segmentation at its best. Cool find!
Daniel,
I’m going to install it. Thanks for the heads-up.
I think it is just what is needed to get their attention.
Thats nice plugin.
I had also seen many plugins to welcome the visitors, but this one is cool, as we get the option to show ads to some selected traffic and keeping minimum ads for our loyal readers.
I also have an installed plugin which welcome new visitors and detect where does the visitor came from.