Less Data in Google Analytics?

New SSL Changes in Google.com

Google Analytics recently changed a feature in Google Search that, as Google states, will protect signed in users’ privacy. They announced that SSL Search will become default for signed in users who use Google.com.

This has a serious impact on the data that is available to us in Google Analytics. When users are logged into a Google service and perform a search, the organic click will:

• Still show up in our Analytics reports
• Still be identified as incoming from Google (the source)
• Still be identified as “organic” traffic (the medium)

However - when you drill down to the keyword level (source > medium > keyword) these searches will have the value of “not provided”.

When I say “serious impact”, I’m talking about the keyword data we’re losing when we want to see a report on top performing organic keywords. This is one of the most common segments our clients like to view in their reports, and we’re not very excited to explain that these reports are going to be “less accurate” moving forward.

If it was only a “minority” of our data as Google is stating, it wouldn’t be a huge issue. However, users don’t simply login to “search”, they login to their account on any of Google’s massively popular website’s/applications/accounts.

Some of these website’s/accounts/applications include:

You’re telling me that people who use these websites on a daily basis are a “small minority” ?

Google states their reason for this significant change as being a security feature. If any user is signed into one of their Google accounts, any search will now be done on a secure socket layer, or more commonly known as SSL.

The Breakdown

How many visitors are actually logged into a Google account as they search? Based on a test done by The Google Cache (reference http://bit.ly/pYcs6X ) around 10% of users are logged in to Google at any given time. This study came from 135,000 unique visitors over a period of three months.

The feedback so far has not been positive. Some say that Google’s new change is a bit of a double standard, because advertisers who use their pay-per-click platform (Google Adwords) will still have access to paid referral keywords, even if the user is logged in, but not organic keywords. How much sense does that make?

In Our Opinion…

Users - For starters, we don’t see what the main benefits are for the users. The search query data received cannot be tracked back to a particular user’s IP address, therefor the privacy concern seems to be off point. The information relayed to Analytics does not include enough on the user to cross any sort of identity boundaries.

Marketers - This will probably result in less targeted marketing campaigns due to lower marketing intelligence (which could affect users as landing pages/ads may not be as optimized/relevant). The fact that this change could easily impact which keywords are showing as your top performers is a legitimate cause for concern. The fact that the pay-per-click platform still provides the same results but unpaid search does not, really doesn’t prove to be protecting anyone’s privacy.

We want to know your thoughts on these Google Search changes. Let us know what you think by leaving a comment or tweeting us @saelstrom.