For anyone who missed it yesterday, Google announced on their Blog that they would be “protecting personalized search results” by encrypting search queries made whilst signed into your Google account. Which, they go on to explain, means that “websites you visit from our organic search listings will still know that you came from Google, but won’t receive information about each individual query”.
For SEOs this means that within Google Analytics (and in fact ALL analytics programs) you will no longer be able to see the referring keyword for a certain percentage of your traffic, and will instead get a variation of the “(not set)” which is used for PPC traffic (I think I remember seeing it will be “(not provided)”). This will obviously create issues for SEOs, who will be unable to fully track campaign performance, as it will also have a knock-on effect on conversion tracking and ROI calculations. Google have mentioned that “an aggregated list of the top 1,000 search queries that drove traffic to a site for each of the past 30 days” will be available through Webmaster Tools, but will this suffice for even medium size sites that may be getting traffic from thousands of queries?
So what are the likely solutions for SEOs…
• Are we going to have to give more weight to less worthwhile metrics such as rankings?
• Are we going to have to spend more time fiddling and combining data from WMT and analytics?
• Are we going to have work on assumptions that traffic to certain pages will have come from certain keywords?
There are a few interesting subplots to this announcement. Firstly, clicks on PPC ads will still send information on the query to “enable advertisers to measure effectiveness of their campaigns and to improve ads and offers they present to you”; obviously Google doesn’t care as much who sees what paid advertising you click on or the information advertisers can use to manipulate your online experience! Secondly, a lot of people are already speculating this is linked to paid Analytics. What are the odds that Google will give this data out to people who cough up for a subscription?
It would be interesting to know your thoughts so I have set up a quick poll. It’s obviously not the most in-depth poll, but feel free to leave your comments below.
One point that i couldn’t find information on is what % of searches are from people signed in. If anyone has this information it would be interesting to get a handle on what % of searches this is likely to effect, although this will increase if Google+ takes off.
Apparently Matt Cutts claims it’s going to affect less than 10% of queries. Even if that’s true, that’s now, who knows where this is heading.
http://searchengineland.com/google-to-begin-encrypting-searches-outbound-clicks-by-default-97435/
Yep – this is, as normal of late ,all about money and forcing small businesses to spend more on PPC.
FB
I don’t think it’s to get people to pay for analytics, assuming no other version is released the current paid version apparently costs $150,000 a year so will be well out of the range of >90% of analytics users.
Interestingly though, you said it only takes effect for people logged into Google? That could just be a way to encourage people to log into Google to not have their data tracked… ironic.
I think i’ll go and read up on this on their blog.
It’ll knock Hitwise et al. out the game too, and doubt the ad networks are overjoyed with the news.
I’ve done a little bit of testing (Firefox, latest and previous versions): if a website uses https then the referrer string is passed so web analytics will still work.
By making this change Google could be encouraging websites to use https as the default which will make the web more secure in general. (More security, means more use of the web and so more $$$ for Google).
Unfortunately not – reports seem to indicate that while the “encrypted search” that was on offer until now did pass the referrer string to target sites that used SSL, the new “SSL by default” version doesn’t pass it at all (it’s near the end of that link I posted above, and I saw it mentioned somewhere else)
I absolutely agree with Richard, Google is business has to roll over a lot more thus we must use the internet a lot more in a secure way, so they are after a perfect user experience and forcing us all to use https is a good way…
it does not mean a lot. After 4 days of ‘non provided’ I only see 0.82% average of visits from organic traffic with keywords missed. Numbers in detail here http://dynamical.biz/blog/seo-technical/non-provided-keywords-38.html