Google has announced that it’s taking privacy more seriously and as of today, users who are logged into their accounts and performing searchings, will no longer have their searches recorded by Google Analytics. In other words, when a logged in users performs a search and clicks on your website, Analytics will no longer tell you what keyword the person searched for. DAMN!
In Analytics, it will still report the visitor as an organic visit, it just won’t drill down to what keyword was searched for before the click was made because this apparently goes against new privacy terms that Google is working on.
SEOs will still be able to see conversion rates, segmentations and such, so not everything’s being removed, but this is definitely a huge smack for all SEOs and website owners who like to see what people are searching for to arrive at their websites.
Inside Analytics you will start to notice “(not provided)” instead of the keywords, allowing you to see that the visitor was a Google logged in users performing a search and organically clicking through to your website.
Interestingly, Google reports that CPC visitors will still be tracked, so that’s a little contradicting isn’t it? I doubt it’ll take long for them to block that too.
I’m not really sure what this is going to mean to SEOs, but what I can tell you is that it’s going to be a punch to the stomach of note and I can only hope that Google will think about this really carefully and if they don’t undo it (which I doubt they will), then they need to come up with something else.
The SEO industry were up in arms over this and Google’s taken quite a smashing today. I must admit, since Google launched its new Analytics with that SEO tab, I can’t help but think that this is some form of data ownership.
What do you think?
Uh-oh! Houston, we might have a problem! I can already hear how online marketers are cringing at this!
I guess we will have to use other tracking programs besides Anaytics, will Google still prevent the keywords being passed through to third party tracking programs?
The bunch of muppets! There is no ways in hell that they can claim this as privacy protection. What utter bullshit. Seriously that is a pathetic excuse and starts to heavily contradict themselves. Google over the last few years is starting to go quite heavily against their own motto – “Don’t be evil”. I wonder if this has anything to do with Premium Analytics? Maybe it is time to move onto another tracking platform?
For wordpress users there is always the KeywordWinner(dot)com option
Bryan, yeh, I think people will start looking at other solutions, but the problem here is that Google controls this and they can stop other applications really easily. It’s a big upset, although I normally know which keywords we’re targeting and traffic estimations and such can provide enough information to not need this, the big problem comes in when you’re trying to deduce which keywords are converting – not having that is going to be a huge problem.
James, yeh, it’s keywords only, there’s no data availability around which keyword was searched by which user, if that was the case, privacy would be a fair statement.
Joost wrote a post about it on SEObook, where he outlined the following:
So I think “privacy” is just a mere pretext. A “convenient” side effect that’s used for PR. The real reason that Google might have decided to stop sending referral data is different. I think it is that its competitors in the online advertising space like Chitika and Chango are using search referral data to refine their (retargeted) ads and they’re getting some astonishing results. In some ways, you could therefor describe this as mostly an anti-competitive move.
In my eyes, there’s only one way out. We’ve now determined that your search data is private information. If Google truly believes that, it will stop sharing it with everyone, including their advertisers. Not sharing vital data like that with third parties but using it solely for your own profit is evil and anti-competitive. In a country such as the Netherlands where I live, where Google has a 99%+ market share, in other words: a monopoly, I’m hoping that’ll result in a bit of action from the European Union.
It’s an interesting viewpoint.
My guess is that most South Africans do not log in before searching so in SA we should be able to get a far amount of stats from those non-signed-in users. It is only us tech geeks that sign in + a few gmail users, but still a very small minority.
I wondered about that Bryan, you know if there are any statistics available? It would be really interesting to know whether only a tiny percentage of people search freely. Surely if you’re logged into GMail, you’re logged into your Google Account, or are they separate?
Yes as I mentioned, if you are logged into Gmail then you will be logged into search, however would love to know how many people actually log in to Google, non of my non IT friends do, I know that for a fact. Maybe something we need to ask Arthur Goldstuckabout to look into.
Agreed, most of my friends aren’t IT folks at all and I highly doubt they’d be signed in. Let me tweet at Arthur :)
my issue with the Google SLL query string debate is we’ll have ZERO android referrer data. You’re always signed into a Google account
Yup :(
I doubt 3rd party apps will help, since Google Search won’t be passing that info along at all – I’m actually in agreement with Joost regarding Google’s “possible” motives.
And to me it sounds more like they are shooting themselves in the foot. SEO’s are the ones that are helping them succeed world wide on the organic side of life. We optimise and educate people on how Google works, their guidelines, we clean up their search results etc. If they don’t provide us with the information their customers/users are using, then how on earth do they expect their search to improve for them? I know only 10% of searches are being made logged in but that is still 10% of data we will be losing. Could they be planning a new paid version of GA to make sure they have another platform out there to make some bucks off SEO’s where you will be able to see this “private data”? or are they just being pure dicks!
And if I am not mistaken (Rafiq you will know better on this) they should then change http to https if they add SSL so aggressively??
I’m surly not very impressed with Google at the moment either about this. Not to even start with the Andriod data. super fail!
@Jaydon – 100%, third party apps won’t help as Google’s in charge, I mentioned this earlier in one of my comments. Thanks for popping in!
@Chris – Agreed, it’s a really strange move and I’d be surprised if they don’t come up with something else to assist SEOs in monitoring such movement by users, just seems absolutely crazy! I’m bleak, it changes a lot around the way I do things, so I’m holding thumbs for something new or an undo. HTTPS will follow shortly. Bryan mentioned earlier that it would seem that this hasn’t been rolled out in South Africa yet, he sees it on overseas websites, but doesn’t see it on local ones.
*Relieved* now analysts will never see how many time me (and many others) are searching for ’100% quality porn’ etc to get to their sites ;-)
Hahahhaha, didn’t think of that ;)