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Last week, Google Analytics announced that in order to provide better privacy protection for users, SSL Search would be the default setting for users logged in to a Google account.
What does that mean? Simply, if an internet surfer is logged into Google, and arrives at your website via a Google search, you’ll see them as an organic visitor in your analytics, but you won’t be able to see what keyword they used to find your site.
Why does that matter? If you’re not regularly checking your analytics or doing organic search engine optimization, it doesn’t matter. However, an important part of any search engine optimization program is looking at the analytics data and determining which keywords are referring the highest volume and highest conversion rate visitors. So losing keyword data for site visitors who are logged in to Google is a blow to your SEO service provider’s ability to know he or she is going after the best, most high-value keywords for your business.
What will be the immediate impact? The change was only announced last week, so we’re still figuring that out. However, you can determine how many visitors are now “blind keyword referrals” by filtering your keyword report for “not provided.” As of right now, in the last week, those referrals make up <1% of site traffic for most of the websites for which we have analytics access.
It’s also good to keep in mind that there have been tools in place for users to do private keyword search for a long time. Google Chrome includes “incognito mode” and there are other browser add-ins that enable secure and private searching. The main difference is that now, private search is the default setting if you are logged in to a Google account.
Will these changes make properly optimizing your website for search engines more challenging? Yes. Any internet marketing firm would prefer to have as complete a data set as possible. However, as it stands now, it’s hardly a crippling blow to any competent internet marketing agency.
What does that mean? Simply, if an internet surfer is logged into Google, and arrives at your website via a Google search, you’ll see them as an organic visitor in your analytics, but you won’t be able to see what keyword they used to find your site.
Why does that matter? If you’re not regularly checking your analytics or doing organic search engine optimization, it doesn’t matter. However, an important part of any search engine optimization program is looking at the analytics data and determining which keywords are referring the highest volume and highest conversion rate visitors. So losing keyword data for site visitors who are logged in to Google is a blow to your SEO service provider’s ability to know he or she is going after the best, most high-value keywords for your business.
What will be the immediate impact? The change was only announced last week, so we’re still figuring that out. However, you can determine how many visitors are now “blind keyword referrals” by filtering your keyword report for “not provided.” As of right now, in the last week, those referrals make up <1% of site traffic for most of the websites for which we have analytics access.
It’s also good to keep in mind that there have been tools in place for users to do private keyword search for a long time. Google Chrome includes “incognito mode” and there are other browser add-ins that enable secure and private searching. The main difference is that now, private search is the default setting if you are logged in to a Google account.
Will these changes make properly optimizing your website for search engines more challenging? Yes. Any internet marketing firm would prefer to have as complete a data set as possible. However, as it stands now, it’s hardly a crippling blow to any competent internet marketing agency.
