A couple of weeks ago Google announced that in order to make personalized searches more secure, Google Search is going be encrypt searches. Almost everyone in the Internet marketing community is pretty bummed out by this decision because this means that analytics tools, all of them, won’t be able to read the URL and collect the keyword that user used to get a site.
Sad times… for us online marketers because it will make the online space more secure, more privacy, world peace, blah, blah…
In the case of Google Analytics, searches from logged in users will be reported as “(not provided)”
As I’m writing, I’m realizing that this is going to affect other tools that use keyword data, e.g keyword research tools like SEOmoz, Google’s Keyword Research tool – wow, that is also going to suck.
How is this going to impact all of us?
I still think nobody knows just yet. We are all speculating about the amount of people that search while logged in, but here’s my thought. It doesn’t matter if they say that only 1% of all searches happen when logged in. If you’re in North America, for example, it’s really going to depend on your audience.
I assume folks like Mailchimp and NextAnalytics, for example, are not liking this change one bit. They target tech savvy users, integrate with Google Apps and have an overall Googly look that makes me think a huge percentage of users interested in this are likely to be logged into some Google property.
Other sites serving a wider audience, say Walmart.com… well, I could see these guys not being impacted that much. But that’s just another assumption.
Our good buddy and SEO connoisseur, Ani Lopez, has posted some numbers on organic keywords on how this is affecting different sites.
There is also lots of articles going around there talking about this, so if you have any info on how this is affecting SEOs, post them here!
Leave a Reply