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Asked: 2026-06-14T15:03:03+00:00

Currently my site – let’s call it www.mydomain.com and it uses Google Analytics. The

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Currently my site – let’s call it http://www.mydomain.com and it uses Google Analytics.

The site is UK based. We also have a mirror USA-based site on the same server, same domain – http://www.mydomain.com/us/, which uses a different Google Analytics ID.

Technically if some visitor comes to our UK site and if his IP address belongs to USA we would like to simply redirect the visitor to our US site by calling a PHP header location, i.e.

header("Location: www.mydomain.com/us/");

If this happens, then we are not sure what happens about GA “traffic” records on the site.

For example, on Google Analytics, if Visitor A types http://www.mydomain.com on their browser and goes to the site, then this is DIRECT TRAFFIC.

If we redirect them to http://www.mydomain.com.com/us/ it is still direct traffic.

If visitor B finds our site on Google search results, and clicks the search result to come into the main site, then it is ORGANIC TRAFFIC. However, if we redirect visitor B to the US site, I am not sure how Google Analytics in our US site treats this.

My questions are

  1. Does it treat the customer as ORGANIC or DIRECT traffic for Visitor B?

  2. If someone comes in via natural search engine rankings and gets redirected by us to the US site, I want them to be classified as organic traffic. How can I ensure that this happens?

  3. General question about bots – we plan to redirect based on the user’s IP. How can we avoid clashing with Google’s IP so that Google (or any bot) can view our UK and US sites without any redirection from my code?

Some suggestions would be highly appreciated.

Many thanks!

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    1. The redirect will have as referrer your old page. So I’m pretty certain that GA would count it as an in-site link, however you have them named in GA.

    2. This is the reason why you ideally would want to avoid doing sneaky redirects. Give your clients/visitors a choice instead of forcing them through a site – most websites tend to do this. What if I have an IP address from the US but am effectively from the UK due to a very small sub-range belonging to an UK-US ISP?

    3. You’ll need to map the IP ranges for the bots. Not an easy task.

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