Over the past two months many Search Engine Marketing professionals have found themselves searching for an answer to the same question. Where has all the data gone?!?!
Gina Pasqua
This all began on October 18th when Google announced that it would start encrypting search queries for any users that were signed into a Google account. Simply put this means that Google stopped showing the organic keywords that are referring traffic to a website when a user is logged into a Google account (https://www.google.com). All organic traffic is still being shown, but to identify users that are signed into an account, Webmasters are left with “(not provided)” in keyword reports. This update has been spread throughout all web analytics tools such as Omniture, WebTrends, Open Stats, Google Analytics etc. Originally, Google predicted that this change would impact 10% or less of searches. In the first few weeks of this roll out the impact was slight and remained in the single digits. Now that two months have passed, “(not provided)” seems to be securing the top organic search keyword position. Below displays an example of it’s in the past two months:
For the website used in the example above, “(not provided)” makes up 11.7% of the total organic traffic in the past month. Google’s reasoning behind this update is said to be part of an effort to make search more secure. Still, there is a lot of speculation that privacy may not be the driving force behind Google’s actions. Since this “secure” data is still available for paid search, it could seem that this is an effort to push website owners to depend more on paid search programs. Google may be trying to have websites increase their paid search campaigns, since they can’t receive full data through organic searches any longer. Regardless of Google’s motives, this SSL encryption has caused a lot of debate across the web and left many questions unanswered.
