On Tuesday, Google announced that signed-in users will, by default, be routed to the SSL version of Google (https://www.google.com). Before Tuesday, most users used non-SSL Google for their searches. Now, according to Google, "...a web site accessed through organic search results on https://www.google.com (non-SSL) can see both that the user came from google.com and their search query... However, for organic search results on SSL search, a web site will only know that the user came from google.com." The effects were obvious immediately. Here's a screenshot of our GA account showing the quantity of "(not provided)" keywords going up from Sunday to today:
Clearly, the inbound marketing community isn't thrilled. Take Ian Lurie of Portent, for example: he declared war with Google outright. Having a bunch of "(not provided)" referral keywords in Google Analytics is definitely not pretty. Fortunately, as Avinash Kaushik explains in this Google+ post, there's something you can do to at least gauge the effects on your analytics, and as Rand will explain, the effects aren't as devastating for most users as they could be. Yet.
In this emergency Whiteboard Friday, Rand will go over the changes Google has made, why it happened (and why it really might have happened), and what you can do to stay calm and fight back. Let us know how this change has affected your sites in the comments below!
Video Transcription
Howdy SEOmoz fans. Welcome to a special emergency edition of Whiteboard Day Agnostic We'll Interrupt Any Day to Do This. Unfortunately, Google has made a big change to the way that they are serving keyword referral data from their search results, and this is going to have an unfortunate impact on all of us who do white hat SEO, who do web analytics, and who try to learn from this practice.
I want to try in this Whiteboard video to explain why this has happened, what Google is doing, why they claim they're doing it, and then also explore some of the reasons that they might actually be doing it, and try to provide some actual information about what folks in the web analytics and SEO spheres can do since this data may become less available.
So let's start by explaining what happens when you do a Google search today. For example, I have done a Google search here for "learn SEO." I click the Search button and some results pop up, and here's this nice learn SEO, SEOmoz, www.seomoz.org, learn SEO, and then there's an ad over here, "Learn SEO from PayMeBucks.com." Click on my ad. Dude, I need your visits bad. That probably would not get approved by the AdWords people, but you can get the idea.
Now previously, if I were to click this result or this result, the web analytics tool, whatever it is - your Webtrends, your Omniture, your Google Analytics - at the other end would get some referral data, so with your log file, get some referral data about what sent that visit, which keyword sent that visit. So in this case, it would be "learn SEO" sent a visit from Google.com search over to my website. It would track whether it's a paid or an organic ad.
This is changing. It is changing only for folks who are logged in. If you are searching from Google and you are logged in, this will be changing so that the logged in behavior, the keyword that referred the visit will be shown as (Not provided). This will show in your web analytics. That's what Google will say. They will use these parenthesis. That's how you can see it in the Google Analytics dashboard currently. However, if you click this paid search ad, they will still be providing the keyword "learn SEO." So logged out behavior in purple here. Logged out behavior always gets keyword "learn SEO" as the referrer. Logged in behavior gets keyword (Not Provided) if you click on organic results. But if you're paying Google, you will still be able to see the referral information.
Now Google claims they're doing this to protect user privacy so that users who are logged in will by default not be showing their searches to the websites that they visit. Unfortunately, I think that there are a lot of people in the search world and folks who observe this who have rightfully stated, well, if Google were trying to protect privacy, they've already to some extent done that by providing a secure search - https search, which is what's doing this as well, the SSL search - for those people who would not like to provide that information. Some very small portion of people do use that form of Google search, the sort of protected search.
So it's already available. The reason they're doing this by default I think that many people suspect . . . I'll link to a great article by Ian Lurie of Portent Interactive, who I think prognosticates or posits the actual reason for this is that ad networks today are being very successful using search referral data from visitors, and they're able to leverage that data across multiple websites. So Google is hoping to remove that ability and be the only ad network that can be aware of your search behavior, thus sort of blocking out other providers using their near monopoly in search to exclude other people from being able to use this data,
That's frustrating. It's sad. It's upsetting. It certainly doesn't fit with what we know about Google. But I think the unfortunate thing here is that those of us in the web analytics/SEO sphere are going to have a tough battle to fight from a PR angle because Google can play the "no this is to protect your privacy" card and use that as their excuse. Of course, if that were the case, it seems very odd that you can pay them and still get the data. But I'm going to reserve judgment on that, and I'll let folks make their own decisions. I do think it's very important that we not just get upset about this, but we also think about what we can do actionably. Anytime a major player in the search world or social world or inbound world makes a big change, we need to figure out what is it, how is that we can best respond, how can we use data, how can we continue to be great marketers.
There are a couple of things that I would recommend. First off, you should be measuring the quantity and percent of the lost keyword data. That is a very important metric that you're going to want to track over time. To do this, you simply go to your web analytics tool, you grab the number of (Not Provided) keywords or referrals, visits that came to, divide that by your total visits from Google organic, and you will get the percent of search referrals affected by this. You want to track this over time because you want to know if that's going up, if more people who are logged into Google are searching and finding your site, what percent of data you're losing, whether this is going to be a big problem as Google rolls it out more broadly, and you can see some data from SEOmoz.
So let's take a look at our own data. This is from Sunday to Thursday of this week, so ending yesterday. We're filming this on Friday for release tomorrow, Saturday. You can see (Not Provided) was 1,062 or 1.2% of the visits over these 5 days. However, the number is going up. So as of Sunday, we had zero visits that did not contain any keyword data. Monday had 90. Tuesday had 111. Wednesday had 381. Thursday had 421. That is 2.2%. So you can see that we've lost keyword information on a little over 2% of our visits and climbing. So this is frustrating. Google has said that they expect this will be less than 10% for most websites. So we hope to continue to get 90% of the data.
That leads me to number two. You can continue to leverage data from sources like the existing Google data, which should be hopefully around 90% of what you have today, Bing and Yahoo data, of course, which are responsible for around anywhere between 10% and 20% of your search referrals depending on your industry and niche, and of course, your internal search query data. This data is invaluable not only for doing keyword research and targeting, but also figuring out conversion rates, trying to optimize for those visitors, make their user experience better. It's really only for white hat types of activities. So it's frustrating that Google pulled this, rather than maybe tackling something more black hat focused. But we have what we have.
Number three, if you do feel strongly about this issue, there are lots of opportunities - I don't want to say complain - but lots of opportunities to let Google know how you feel. This is a change that they are making, and they are currently planning on making and rolling on and have been rolling out. But that doesn't mean that they might not backtrack if user feedback is overwhelmingly negative, and certainly that would be nice for those of us in the analytics sphere who like to use this data.
So you can obviously blog about it, write about it. You could even write to your congressional rep. There are several forums. The Google blog post announcing this accepts comments. The Google Webmaster Tools forum certainly accepts comments. You can also contact your AdWords representatives and let them know that you're not totally thrilled by this move either. Remember AdWords data is still passing the refer. It's organic search that is affected.
So hopefully this won't affect too big a percentage of search queries and thus will still continue to have some good data, but given Google's efforts to try and make more people be logged into Google Plus, to Gmail, to Google hosted apps, I don't know. There is a lot of, I think, fear and uncertainty right now in the analytics world.
But with that said, you have some actionable things you can do. You should definitely start tracking this data, and hopefully we will see you again next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday, rather than an emergency, interrupting version. We hope we don't have too many of these. Take care everyone.
Video transcription by Speechpad.com
p.s. from Rand: I highly recommend checking out Danny Sullivan's more thorough writeup on this event at SELand: Google Puts a Price on Privacy.
2% isn't a lot, but my fear is that a year from now it will be 50%.
Yes, it makes really no sense for Google to do hide data for logged in users only.
If they want to damage their competitors, removing 2-10% of their data won't do that severely.
If they want to "protect user privacy" (okay, easy on the sarcasm here...), why stop with protecting 2-10% of the users.
Here we are a year later. I wonder if SEOmoz will do a follow-up? Our e-commerce site is at about 14%. I would expect it to be higher for sites that are more likely to be visited by logged-in people ... like Android smartphone users, who are always logged in, no?
And now 75% worldwide. 2% sound really good right now.
As of today, I've paused my PPC ads with Google. I know it sounds stupid, but a monetary loss is really the only way to affect change in business. If we complain, but continue to use Google's services our complaints are undermined.
Take in ACTION!! Thumb up...
Hi Rand,
Great video - I wanted to share some of my thoughts on the Datapocalypse:
2.2% is very consistent with what we're seeing. I've seen as high as 4% on sites serving highly technical audiences, down to .5% and less on sites that serve a less technical audience. Alan Bleiweiss of Click2Rank reported seeing .005% to 2.5% on Oct 20th (https://twitter.com/#!/AlanBleiweiss/status/127172923122393088 & https://twitter.com/#!/AlanBleiweiss/status/127172999504859137). Justin Cutroni reported seeing 1.5% across the sites he has access to (https://twitter.com/#!/justincutroni/status/126816155095666688).
In addition to your internal search data and your Bing/Hoo data, you can also look at your search landing pages and see how they are driving conversion to infer the effectiveness of different terms.
My biggest personal reaction to this decision was sadness - when I look at search queries, I often use them to make my pages better and more useful based on what people are searching for. For example, I found one of my pages was attracting a large number of searches for "Zynga Product Manager Interview". Now I'm adding a 'Resources for Zynga PM Interviews' section to the page. Zynga interviews a lot of management consultants and finance types for PM positions, so now people who don't come from an online background can educate themselves for their job interview.
If that's not delivering value for searchers from query data, I'm not sure what is. I wish I could continue to use search data to find out what people want so I could make it, but sadly Google isn't sharing their valuable data with me.
A pox on me for a clumsy lout, but I'm wondering whether this loss of data might actually be a good thing.
As personalized search has become even more.. you know, personal, it stands to reason that the data those users bring along is unreliable for SEO or even CRO. Each logged in user arrives from a SERP customized to match his or her history and social activity. Webmasters or Marketers can't confidently make site-wide decisions based on this once-a-vistor data, can they? By tagging the personalized visits, Google is allowing analysts to see what visitors arrived via its main algorithm - the one we should be optimizing for and the one most organic visitors will arrive via. Therefore, we have a more reliable data set for making site wide decisions.
Thoughts?
That is a very interesting thought. I guess the next question would be how much is the SERP actually 'personalized'?
My point exactly. Depending on how involved users are with their Google account (how many social media accounts are linked, how engaged with social-search their connections are, how much history Google has to pull from, etc.) each SERP is customized a little differently.Without knowing what is different about each personalized search visitor, the data is unreliable.
In my perfect world, I would like to see Google and other search engines pass all the data but tag the personalized visits so I can see how behavior differs.
- Steve, on behalf of Rasansky Law Firm
Thanks, Rand, for being there for us in emergency status! Have to admit that I never thought I would consider writing a congressman. You did well not to pass judgement and appreciate your being "polictically" correct in this WB Friday. I'll try to follow your lead and remain calm...
Below is a link to a custom report in Google Analytics, a small gift from Avinash:
https://twitter.com/#!/avinash/status/127153191824539648
Small gift: A Google Analytics custom report to keep an eye on Google's https keyword change trend:https://goo.gl/UuKY0 #data
Ditto: "If Google starves white hat SEOs of the data we need to help them stay at the top, they may force us to help their competitors instead."
Matt Cutts needs to complain loudly about this one because he looks bad here, after years of work to make peace with the marketing community. As the percentage of logged in users grow, inbound marketers are going to start losing. The groups with good data will win. Those groups include: paid search advertisers, paid search networks, retargeters, black hat seo tactics, hackers using unethical tracking techniques and spyware. Way to go Google.
I consider tuning a site to please visitors akin to driving - many small adjustments made along the way so that you arrive at your destination. Are you safer driving if you can't see 10% of the road? No.
oh if anyone needs me i'll be hiding under a rock waiting for my ppc guys to give me insights based on their data now....
No big deal as people have pointed out except for those using Android... and those in Google+.... this problem will only get bigger over time not smaller...
Wow if Adwords is still passing the refer then the move is not protect user privacy. We should not accept the move. Google is acting as monopoly, really a sad and selfish move from Google
White hat SEO has a de facto partnership with the search engines to provide a good experience to internet users by presenting them with relevant and satisfying information.The ability of any one search engine to dominate the search market is rooted in their ability to provide satisfying results to their users. The ability of SEOs to work to meet the needs of people who use any one search engine is rooted in the quality of search referral data available from that search engine.
How much Google data do we have to lose before our ability to help Google dominate the search market suffers? A loss of a few % of data wouldn't be a big problem for me when looking at the high volume generic terms which mark the entrance to our conversion funnel. However, the problem of skewed data increases as search volume drops. As SEO for an internet retailer I need to know what's happening in mid-volume and long tail search because that's where we convert visits to revenue. If (or when) this change rolls out to the UK this could really hurt my ability to do my job.
I currently focus on catering to Google users because they make up the majority of our site visitors and I have a lot of data available about their behaviour (without invading their privacy or interrupting their browsing experience) to draw on when working out how to better serve their needs. However, if I lost a significant amount of Google data I think I would pay more attention to their competitors than I do now. From a business viewpoint I would find it far easier to justify investing resources in building traffic and revenue from a smaller player like Bing based on solid data than blindly throwing resources at Google. I'm not saying I would just ignore Google, but I would certainly become more motivated to develop alternate traffic sources.
If Google starves white hat SEOs of the data we need to help them stay at the top, they may force us to help their competitors instead. If more SEOs tailor their work to suit people using other search engines then restricting access to search referral data could ultimately affect the quality of Google search results and become a threat to their dominant position in the search market. The day SEOs working for quality sites care more about ranking on Bing or Yahoo than on Google is the day Google becomes the land of spam.
Google has seemed to reach a tipping point, where they've scraped the entire Internet, and made us somewhat dependent on their services. We let it happen because they were providing a better search experience than most other engines, but they're reached a stage where they're now making us pay for our own data. No pay, no play.
I really hope this will backfire on Google, and get people to start using alternatives. Google wouldn't be where it is today without its users, but they're getting greedy and play games by chalking this up as user privacy. How concerned were they with user privacy when they started scraping every site they could find 11 years ago.
This is obviously a big change, which got a lot of people riled up, but the rabbit hole goes way deeper: https://www.fairsearch.org/
2 Points:
1) Has anyone else (and I'm sure you all have) that sites with many Plus+ votes are routed through Google and not directly to the site? I think that is a big deal. Google can do whatever it wants with the redirect.
2) Google is not our friend. They are a business that is going to be more and more business like as search becomes more and more distributed across FaceBook, Bing, Twitter, Groupon, .... They really don't have to give any information about visitors. They could give the website a category of the search phrase and that's all.
I have said it once and I will say it again - Google doesn't want to be in the organic search business. Google Plus, AdWords, and Local. That's where the money is and that's what the first 5 pages will contain. The number one search result will be on page 6.
Who bets that Google might be offering organic keyword data in their Premium Analytics offering?
I personally think it would be a daft move and leave them open to a whole heap of criticism, but I wouldn't put it past them!
I think after the initial rant and hue and cry this move by Google will take SEO campaigns above the metrics of keywords and rankings and the focus will be on other quality metrics like CTR , conversions, bounce rate, etc. which will improve the quality of the web overall as the websites besides being rich in content will have to focus on good landing pages, a proper call to action, page load speed and good navigation which will ensure a better UX .
I Think if Google introduces the continuous scroll for search results along with this development of making search more secure then every SEO campaign will genuinely go beyond the metrics of keywords and rankings and only those SEOs focusing on the true meaning of SEO and working on technical and quality aspects like getting the site getting indexed properly in the search engines, improving the internal architecture, educating the client about his overall web presence will be the ones who will survive.
It is very difficult to know the main objective of Google behind this development.Even if today it may be for promoting paid search as many believe, but in the long run it will surely make the organic search scene more qualitative and carve a genuine and true niche for SEO.
I think all these changes are drawing a clear distinction line between organic search campaigns and paid campaigns in a qualitative way. As the true meaning of SEO is to ensure quality search engine presence on maximum search options by focusing on overall quality web presence by enhancing the quality aspects of the website and reach out to netizens via various modes of social media and the overall web options available.
I disagree. I share Cyrus' concern that G plans to exclude a growing percentage of organic data. My site relies on long tail searches many of which appear have extremely high bounce rates due to their nature (question easily answered) or substantially lower bounce rates (more thoughtful or drill down type searches). G not only conceals the weight of bounces on search terms on a page vs. bounce rate on the page, they now want to conceal the terms so we can't even improve our sites? All of this so G can combat competing add networks? Privacy concerns are a diversion and, as in many other G decisions, user experience is subordinated to Adwords revenues. Since enforecment of the U.S. antitrust laws has been dead since the early 80's, I hope the E.U. picks this up. As Bob Jones observed, G is reaching a "tipping point".
Is it possible that seomoz can organize a petition/protest and we can digitally sign it and send it to big G? These petition/protests are done for different reasons and sometimes can be very effective. I think Google is trying to make their monopoly even stronger, sad but true.
Thanks for the great video
Hi Rand,
I second this comment. Can we organise an online petition? We need to fight back and make our voices heard.
I looked on the Google Webmaster Forums and there is no post about it, therefore I made a post here asking others to contribute. I for one am outraged by this cynical move to shoehorn SEMs into AdWords.
https://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Webmasters/thread?tid=5972c6fb806ae7eb&hl=en
Please post your replies for Google to see and as Rand said contact your AdWords rep.
Andy.
Google cares so little about search engine optimization. For all they care we could all dissappear. They DO care however about their Adwords customer base. Once we learn that, maybe we'll all stop giving Google a BJ.
Hi rand and great video. I am one of the many who wrote about this change and, sincerely, I don't think google will change the decision. It is "politically correct" at first sight (even though it is high hipocritic) and it is essential in its strategy against Facebook. In fact, trying to look at the big picture, google needs people staying into its properties and logged in and become a walled garden as FB is. And then save the data to make them even more valuable and sell them to advertisers. As I wrote in my post, it's an AdWar where SEOs are collateral victims The fact is that we are tough...
I see your point but Google is /was built on open source and openess in general! This is the wrong move they cannot be open and closed at the same time.
This is a total abuse of Google's monopoly and I can't believe they would even think about this in the middle of their ongoing anti-trust investigation.
They effectively control access to Adwords too. I'm permenently banned from Adwords as a result of a few petty affiliate marketing campaigns years ago and now I'm totally locked out.
This is a nightmare! I have handwritten dozens of scripts to work around Google's data to dynamically pass goal and conversion data from organic searches into various analytical services. And now they're all effectively worthless for these logged-in users. When you do business in a highly technical niche, the percent of searches affected is drastically greater than with other niches.
Building a sustainable business without PPC has been hard enough. Then panda hit and everything became even more volatile. Now this? Welp, see ya later... I'm giving up on the internet.
there is a way around any ban - just ask a friend/family member to sign up and use their account. Be sure to use a different IP address and dont put traffic on any of the sites that are associated with your banned account
At a minimum it is going to be a great Q4 financially for Google, given Black Friday and the dependance of retailers for online search, they will be forced to put more money towards PPC and Google's Ad Networks. Google's timing is perfect as the almost did this well after Google+ was opened to the public.
Maybe they decide to back track early in 2012 to "respond to user complaints" and just after the holiday sales season has ended ;)
The other end game is that Google could start charge for this data via the $150k yearly Analytics package similar to what Experian does for Credit Reporting data. If Google had a revenue stream from Organic and could then justify to shareholders the need to invest in providing better reporting to grow this business segment. It might in fact provide us with even better information and insights with the potential to be a huge sustainable advantage for SEO agencies as the small guys could not afford this data and would be force to rely on an agency to provide the organic analytics data to them.
Of course that really kills what I love so much about search and the web. Everyone is as close as possible to being on equal ground and that obviously would go away.
This might also allow BING to jump for a game changing move. What if they decided to open up the Analytics and provide even more insight? How many of us would be willing to make the switch? I might give it a shot for a while but it would probably be similar to my effort for Google+ .... forced and not engaged.
I guess as long as we all have to play by the same rule, at the end of the day we are still competing with each other and the best SEOs will still win.
Thanks! This is exactly why I have all of googles blogs via RSS so I stay up to date on stuff like this. :) You look tired my friend. :)
After going through the video and Avinash’s post Google+ I guess I am conformed that there is no point of shouting so loudly but I guess one should come up with the blog post, comment, and any source that tells Google that we are not happy with this change so that they can consider taking this change back (I don’t see this happening anytime sooner!)
Agree that there is no point of panic, especially after the actionable things that Rand’s discuss in his video, but what Google say about this change that it’s there to protect privacy sounds like a total joke to me…
Thanks for the Video Rand!
wow google is definitely not playing nice in the sand box with the other kids and really acting like an 800lb gorilla.
Absolutely agree...at least that's what it looks like...while using the wild card "we're thinking about user experience/privacy"...it's kind of sad they CAN have the data and share it at their will while the rest of webmasters depend upon them. Sad. However, (IMHO) that's what we get for not having competition.
This is the simple math of the daily increase in "Not Provided" Keyword data that I am seeing from your post:
Day 0 0
Day 1 900% (figuring from 1)
Day 2 10% Decrease
Day 3 470% Increase
Day 4 110% Increase
Understandably there are a lot of other factor which effect the number and percentage of "Not Provided" Keywords.
Can SEOmoz show use in a week, month, 90 days, etc. what has happened? Maybe a survey that allows mozzers to contribute how their keyword data a has changed.
Absolutely. I'll try to keep folks updated regularly and I like the idea of a survey or collection of results from numerous websites to help show those stats. Will try to put that together in a few weeks
Rand... This is an issue.. in the last 4 days, all of my top search keyword positions are now "Not Provided".. We have got to do something about this.
such a cynical attempt attempt to squeeze money out of people. Google is definately losing its cool factor, first it spam organic SERPS with ads and now makes you pay for basic data. Next we'll see pop-ups when we 'google' something. Lets hope bing and blekko grow in market share so we can have some actual competiton
You can also still get the ranking in analytics with a filter like this:
https://www.chrisabernethy.com/tracking-keyword-ranking-position-with-google-analytics/
Rand's comments on Ian Lurie's observation that google is doing this to throttle outside ad networks could raise antitrust issues, as it clearly seems to be anticompetitive, and (probably) illegal. The DOJ should take action.
google is the definition of anticompetitive and one day it will get bitten hard
Google needs to change their slogan from "Don't Be Evil" to "Be evil sometimes".
Right now I haven't felt the impact of this with most of my clients yet as they are Australia-specific businesses and we focus on tracking google.com.au and not google.com, which has not yet been impacted. Have there been any news on when this change is going to be rolled out world-wide to all Google domains?
Did you here any more on when this might get rolled out to Australia? We are in the same position so not seeing impacts yet.
We tested this on a client which gets very good traffic for the AU market xxx,xxx + uniques over 7 days, it is evident that the impact on this is low below 0.5% of users impacted under "Not Provided" this client is local so int traffic is very very low..
Regards,
James Norquay.
I learnt that in statiscs everything under 2% doesn't matter and under 5% is not a problem, beacause these data are in the statistic tolerated fails. Maybe we can apply this fact.
This is exactly the way I feel. Maybe this is a catalyst to start becoming more dynamic and diversified with our techniques and knowledge bases.
Thank you for covering this Rand; I've gone ahead and blogged it, tweeted it and left a comment on the Analytics blog, hopefully enough of us will rise up together and Google will retract the change.
Great post Rand!
With the latest "Search Engine Optimization" area of GA which illustrates the recent organic search queries from Webmaster Tools...is this possibly the new location of our organic query data that we will need to rely on?
Reason being, in the traditional organic area, I notice an increase in "not provided" keywords...however, in this area of GA I have yet to see one.
Does anyone else see something different?
Cheers,Ross
Hey Ross - unfortunately, I think the data in that new section that comes from Google Webmaster Tools may not be particularly useful, actionable or accurate. Cyrus covered it nicely here - https://www.seomoz.org/blog/seo-reports-google-analytics
So whats the suggestion?! (except those need money, you know :D)
How does this impact the data moving forward within the Google Keyword Tool? If that data is not changed then you could leverage historical ratios and trends to some degree as a comparative metric to take a "best guess" at some of the missing information. Obviously it's not perfect, but as long as enough of the variables are provided, you can solve any equation!
Especially you and your team Rand. You guys rock!
I think that data will remain, but it won't be particularly helpful to site owners for much of the current usage. This data is critical for seeing how particular keywords perform, what interesting long tail searches are of value (which can expose new keyword or content opportunities) and the conversion/goal rates of various visitors. None of those will be reversible from the Adwords data sadly.
Thanks for the kind words!
Thank you Google for giving the middle finger to anyone that uses Google Analytics to track how customers found their website. I bet if we paid the 150k for your premium we can see the keywords. You're hurting the small businesses. You're only favoring the big companies that spend tons of money on adwords.
Whenever you get a (not provided) as the referrer, Hit 'em with the +1. With that referrer, you should be confident they have a Google+ account. Use that knowledge to your advantage. Sure, I hate that data is being withheld all of a sudden, and will probably complain about it as well. But in the meantime, use whatever knowledge you have. I am seeing good results with this so far.
Nice unobtrusive, yet noticeable slide in, "Hey if you like us, +1 us baby!"
Hi Nbyloff, Can I ask what the process you are suggesting is? Is it as simple as displaying the +1 button on page? In my experience (in the publishing industry (we are lifestyle health etc not niche or tech at all) there has not been much interaction with the +1, in fact we are thinking of removing it. Facebook likes are much more popular.
Your suggestion is interesting though, can you explain the process?
Andy
It's worth trying by making the +1 more prominent with search visitors who come in with the (not provided) keyword. Most people have more engagement with FB likes now, but if you make sure the user notices the +1, knowing they are a logged in user on Google, I have seen a decent most of +1's by those people when:
Google+ Engagment = (+1s for page / Total # logged in Google users)
Thanks for the video Rand yup this is Google's attempt to use its power to out competition both in ad space and analytics and make even more money.
Thanks for a great video on this one, Rand. I don't think you are too harsh on Google - its' definitely necessary to make a bit noise here.
In a post about the subject on Google+, Avinash argued for a data driven approach (while also trying to downplay the whole thing). I argued it was silly to make any conclusions about the effect Particularly for us over in Europe) as it's only rolled out to google.com
So Avinash has produced a GA custom report that tracks the number of (not provided) keywords over time. Add it to your GA here: ttp://goo.gl/UuKY0.
Thomas
thank you for have sharing these links; very useful for me
What can we do to fight back? As well as sharing our feelings in the places Rand mentioned we could
1.) Strike. Stop using AdWords and let them feel the monetary impact from dejected Search Engine Marketers
2.) Remove the +1 button from our sites - why would we advertise our own nemesis?
You would need to be very careful that you weren't simply cutting off your nose to spite your face here. Emotional responses are rarely advisable.
A strike is a good way to show dissatisfaction but yes it does require short-term sacrifice.
Is Google really the enemy?
I think if you have access to a wealth of data from the PPC side you should be fairly fine from the KW research area also utalizing advanced areas for keyword research. I feel this is just an extra thing Google is trying to do to fight Facebook direct on "privacy" winners, could be the next phase of a high level PR and marketing camaign via main stream media who knows?
I'll admit that this has me a bit paranoid....but let me go down a slippery slope. Maybe this is setting the stage for a premium upgrade to Analytics?
Google can block referring kw information. They can be selective about it, too. They could, for example, keep Clicky's third party analytics from getting this information. They have no obligation to provide us with anything they don't want to provide.
If I didn't know any better I'd say that Rand was encouraging SEOs to get to all the Google hotspots mentioned in the WBF and tell Google how disgruntled we are with the changes. I don't like it one bit. I've setup an Advanced Segment using (not provided) as keyword to see what's what. Similarly to SEO MOZ I'm seeing increases in non defined keyword traffic. Why is Google doing this? It's the classic case of the bad credit, credit card company mailout. 'Here, have a credit card!'. You cann them up and say 'Yes, I'll have a credit card', with their response being 'Sorry, you can't have a credit card!' Why? Because the two departments aren't talking to each other. Why is Google rolling out massive changes in Analytics with real time search, SO much customosation to SERPs and now this? Is anyone else a little confused? Or was the Google algorithm actually written by George Orwell...?
Dan
I've only noticed about 2% of my traffic affected by this so far, I wonder if anyone else is experiencing the same? Also isn't this counter intuitive for Google since the first thought I had was going to Bing and Yahoo for data instead. It's proportionately smaller but the key word is proportionately... You can still get the same percentages, just on a smaller scale.
I just did an initial report from Oct. 18th which is when I started seeing the "not provided" show up in analytics. So far on all organic searches, these "not provided" queries only make up 1.4% of all my organic search traffic. Is anyone seeing bigger percentages than this? I expected it to be much higher as I would guess that way more than 1% are logged in when searching... something doesn't seem right.
Does anyone know if Google is always responding with "not provided"?
yes, my numbers are much higher then that. "Not provided" now dominates my analytics #1 position
Which brings me to my premonition, if you are not a plusser then you are on the wrong side of the cloud. I that change is just a beginning.
whatever happened to "do not evil" - seems that now that they have a monopoly on search, that might have been forgotten. Protecting use privacy!, seems more like trying to protect market share.
Hi everyone.
Just sharing a quick note that our "not provided" number has jumped from less than 0.5% from the 18th up to 3.5% over the last two days ( 1.5% on the 31st and 3.5% yesterday on the 1st) on a site that gets pretty decent traffic (low 6 figures in uniques per month).
I am more curious if anyone has seen a similar jump in their trend line the past couple days or if maybe we are just getting to that 2%+ now that many have reported.
We have a client that has seen "not provided" jump from about 1.87% two weeks ago to last week at over 8%! They rank #2 for a larger head phrase so my best guess is that they are coming from this. Its a shame that Google is taking this route because it really hurts SEO's doing it the right way...
i saw and analyze this thing some weeks before, but did not took this in my consideration becuase my websites didn't affect as much as you said but still thanks for update Rand...
Well, I would call it a "SELFISH" move from the Google. Google already rules the search engine world, adword world and every possible world over the internet. Why this update then??? Only to discomfort the webmasters... But, the way Rand describes the way out for this update is amazing... Will be helpful for us for sure....
For me the biggest question is will this remain a 'logged in only' feature or are we likely to see this rolled out to all users of Google? I suspect that we will in time and that's when this is really going to start affecting SEO's.
I just asked "SIRI: if Google was acting selfishly. She said to "Mind My Business" and then continued to pass judjement on my suit.
All jokes aside/there is nothing we can do about it...Like my dad says...Adjust, adjust, adjust!
In GA is (not set) the same as "not provided"?
I am in the UK and I've not seen any stats yet for "not provided". However I am now seeing (not set) coming through in numbers of 0.23% for the last Calendar month.
David
I think found a way around it. I have https://www.woopra.com/ installed on my site because I wanted live traffic before Google offered it. Well when I look at my Woopra account for this week it is shows 4 terms. Google shows one (not provided) but the others are 3 are showing. Woopra shows the term that Google has set as (not provided)
Hi,
Just been checking our Google search data for the last 2 months. Am I right to assume that data hidden by Google is only affecting Google US and not UK currently?
Thanks
Simon
On one of my sites I'm seeing 38% (not provided) accoridng to GA. On another it's 20%.
I think Google is making a huge mistake by hiding the keywords from referral data for logged in users. I often use this data to know what is working to tweak my content to fit the reader's needs. I don't begin to buy that it is to protect the searcher's privacy. What BS imo.
Thank you for this article and, more importantly, the awesome video! It's really super helpful in breaking it down. Rock on!
Thanks for this article..its quite informative.. I would like to ask that "why Google Analytic is showing Google.com & google.com.pk as traffic sources Referrals? , Google.com.pk & Google.com should be in the Organic Search. I am also not the paid member of Google.
And When clicking on these domains I am getting this https domain : https://www.google.com/webhp
It mean that "searches made after logging in to Google, analytic take it as a referral..?
Thanks
Sumyiah
Thanks Rand for keeping us updated by your great video
I guess that google is preparing these new changes to feature it in google analytics premium
strange changes always followed by magnificent thing from google as it used to (I hope to)
Rand, great video, you are so well spoken, articulate, thorough. A few points, on my site, I've usually had total daily traffic on avg of 20-30 per day. But on Nov 10th it went to an amazing 71! -Then on the 11th it was 139! The twelfth it was back down to 34. Why the spike in traffic, the likes of which I have never seen? My #1 keyword was (Not provided) with 119 hits! Seems my (not provide) keywords are additional traffic to my site. Am I the only one with this behavior? I'd also like to clarify that you stated the data from organic searches is lost to analytics but data from Adwords is not. Well, to be clear this is very different data, an organic search is personal because it is what an individual person typed. Where a simple, single click is not as personal or individual and therefore does not require the same need for ananimity. Also, as I understand it, https does not pass data to anyone, not even Google, so as such, it can not be bought by anyone!
Thanks for reading my $0.02 Joe
So this means I am loosing a good number of keyword data. Sucks. Most people are using G+ so they are signed in just like me, so I am not able to track their KW.
Hi there,
First of all, thanks Rand for the blog post. Though this will affect websites in different ways, I also strongly think that volume of "not provided" KWs will increase more than the 1% most people tends to talk about.
As an example, I would like to share our situation at Cirque du Soleil. In the first days, % of not provided KWs were indeed below the 1% but since November 1st, % has strongly increased to reach 6% (as of November 3rd stats).
To be honest, I really anticipate this to continue to increase as I suspect that this Google change hasn't already impacted everyone doing searches while being logged-in in various countries (at this time, 77% of not provided comes from the US).
This is why people, and I hear it all over, using wrapping sites like pageWash and the like.
I suppose this brings online businesses into line with offline businesses which have to guess at how people arrived at their store and what made them buy.
My feeling is that people should not panic - even if you can't see 10% of the referrals, you can assume that they came to your site with the same referrals as the other 90%, and distribute them in the same proportions.
Think of it as a sample - instead of a 100% sample, you have a 90% sample. Opinion polls frequenlty sample just 1000 people, but approximate pretty well for the general election, where effectively a 100% sample of 200 million people is in effect.
Yeah, this is a slimey move on Google's part. Most of my clients' businesses are far from the tech world, so luckily I'm seeing only about .4% "not provided" data. Still, pretty shady.
I'm seeing around the same, about 0.2%. Lets hope that stays the same!
@Rand say for instance I have my own custom Search bar on my blog and I am tracking this data in Google Analytic, when folks use the search tool on my site, will I be able to see the referrer keywords in Google Analytics for users who are also signed on Google? (<<<--- This is pure search results generated from in site searches).
Please advice
I'm not 100% sure, but I believe that yes, you will have tracking on internal site searches (or at least a record of the queries performed by internal visitors) for now. This could, of course, change.
Privacy argument is very weak especially as the SEO community can clearly see this is a new monetisation stream coming through. I spoke to Google recently about their premuim solutions (which were ridiculous scales of investment) and thought to myself would GA solutions stop there.
So will we see in time a new set of GA solutions coming in 2012:
GA Free - No cost! No organic data!
GA Business Lite - $10 a month - 1000 organic keyword data access
GA Professional - $20 a month - 5000 organic keyword data access
GA Premium and so on etc.
David (Slightly cynical)
This is a bad news for the entire seo field where we are trying to explain to our client that we need to understand how people reach out their websites to improve "user experience" and sales. "user privacy" is not the reason why google is doing this because as you pointed it, these datas keep running into adwords reports.
So i invite every player of the seo world to write a post about this because this is defintely unfair!
Thanks for the post Rand. I share your concerns. This move will be detrimental to white hat SEO, as well as detrimental to many efforts to use web analyticsto be more data driven. This seems like an inconsistent application of so-called privacy concerns (if you pay Google then you can still get the data! What's up with that?). One of my first thoughts was to wonder if Google is using this move to better position the use of their Webmaster Tools. What do you think of that? Regardless, this move by Google seems like a big mistake and I hope they back track soon.
After 4 days of 'non provided' keywords here you have some numbers.Are you scared for a 0.82% of keywords missed?
Being relatively new to SEO and not too technical the last post does give a balanced view on things. However the cynic in me thinks that Google are using their power as a monopoly (surely the monopolies commission in the UK must be looking into this?) to generate more share holder value. Who hear is really bothered about the privacy of their search terms? I'm not, that's for sure - but then, there are the conspiracy theorists who worry about giants like google getting all their data and doing something with it nasty...
Good post - thanks for the heads up. Which google blog can I read more about this in?
I understand that this refer data can be seen if your site is https as well? I have heard many say this should be the case, but have not seen any official confirmation.
so for example if it was an easy switch, could you get all your data by simply switching to https?
How hard would it really for most sites to move to SSL? a 5 yr cert is around 100$ and if more people moved in that direction the cost would go way down. What are the thoughts on this?
I wonder if this has anything to do with the anti spam policy?
Thanks Rand! This really helps put things intomperspective. I find it hard to believe that 90 percent of Google search is from non logged in users.
It is moves like this that remind me that nothing online is too big to fail.
Thank you for Video Transcription.
did the video not work for you either?
I'm just getting a black box.
Thanks Rand for the video & explaning the the process in detail. I too think that it'll show less impact as of now & as above @Cyrus stated it'll be 50% from year on.
I was thinking that it is now rolled out only in .com but whether they'll rolled it out to other coutries as well, any indication?
Also, I don't know to whom Google are fooling, protecting users privacy? C'mon, if that is what they think then why not shown the same to PPC as well. Yes, definitely in the coming months there'll be hundreds or thousands of post will be there on this.
I wish google should CALL OFF these SSL implementation asap.
Will this change also have effect in Googles webmastertool?
I have a question. Does being logged into a Google account alter search behavior and keyword choice? I cannot think of reason that this would be so. It seems to me that remaining referral data is just as relevant.
Hi, I'm not sure if it alters keyword choice, but it certainly alters the search engine results you get. When we look at rank for a client, it is always with personalization turned off (an incognito window in Chrome is easy and quick).
+1 *Near Monopoly of Search by Google* There was a lot of speculation floating around and I want to thank Rand for clearing most of it up! I agree that we will need to see how many searches come back as "(not provided)" as I feel the majority of lay persons searching the web DO NOT log into a Google Account yet. You mentioned that Google+, Google Calendar and Gmail are all dependent on these accounts so I guess time will tell! Great distinction between Organic and PPC data. PPC data would have to be transferred as the prices are dependent on the search phrases clicked on.
I think most people underestimate how many logged in searchers there are. How many people check their gmail without logging out after they're done?
Thats true, however, i feel that many people check their email from mobile apps where their technically not logged into their account. The sync options allow them to view, create and delete without having to login through the browser.
One big factor would be the Google +, but IMO, i think Google mis-marketed the social network and really shot themselves in the foot. Having a closed invite months ago when there was a buzz really hurt them. Personally, I deleted my Google + as my friends are still on FB.
What do you think?
I rarely ever log out of my gmail. Most of my coworkers and friends are the same way.
I completely understand where you're coming from @rocketmary, but what about those not in the industry? During my day to day at the office I'm logged into my Google accounts throughout the work day. What about your personal time while shopping online?
In my personal life, I wear many hats (being a fireman, rescue technician, competitive power lifter and avid handy man) and feel that the general public would log off and leave the office. Perhaps it's because I have many Google Accounts and I differentiate between them as per work and personal.
By no means am I saying this is 100% for everybody! this is simply based on my experiences. :)
@LMDNYC What are your thoughts?
Does anyone know if this data is not provided at all regardless of the analytics tool being used? We have a client that uses a custom analytics tool that seems it isn't effected by this change; their GA data shows 1.24% of traffic as (Not Provided) but the custom tool shows no such data and has their biggest Keyword with more visits.
There're no changes in Google.com.ua. All search results are still without https.
same for Germany. I'm logged in and still no https. So was this rolled out for any other version than google.com yet ?
I first though it would not really be so important since I could just add the landing page as a dimension and thereby have a good guess which keyword is "not provided" by taking the 6 years of Analytics data we have into consideration.
But darn it, I didn't think about all the long-tail and also forgot how many times Google ranks the - to my mind - wrong page higher instead of the page that's optimized for the term.
I have found my visits to increased to 5%.. and it makes me more scared cuz I won't be able to analyze this visits deeply.
This step is totally made for adowords promo by giving an indirect way of announcement from google to protect the user policies.. which I doubt cuz.. on the other hand every kind of data is being sold via adowords!
Google has already introduced "encrypted google" then why again this dramatic step from google? I have the previsualization..that people would prefer bing in future cuz they are not hiding anything from webmasters .. and additionally they have higher conversion rates to the websites being shown in their Search results!
If it's possible please provide more actionable methods to analyze the visits of signed in google users..!
Thanks Rand!
I have always been a big beliver in using Adwords conversion data for SEO. I am not quite sure how this will affect me, but if my competitors don't know what the hell is happening, then this may be an edge I have on them.
I honestly think they are trying to force more people to use their Adwords program.
I think that Google is really just trying to squeeze every last $ (or €) out of people. I don't think that Google cares about your privacy. Just about what's in your wallet. Here in Germany they had to blank the last numbers out of IP Addresses to protect user privacy. On the other hand they want you to log in with your G+ account all the time.
I haven't noticed any impact from this change yet, so I assume google.co.uk is not affected at this point. Doubtless this will change, unless only American searchers' "privacy" is worth protecting in Google's view.
Of course, as was noted in the comments above, the people who are logged in are receiving personalised search results anyway and the data we are left with after this change will have that element filtered out (although of course personalisation by location will remain).
As handy as Google Analytics is, I get a ton of empty data from them with 0.00 minutes time on site and 1 pageview. Log file analysis has always been the better of the two types of data analysis.
1. WhosOn is better than GA.
2. Clicktracks is better than GA.
Spend some money and own your data. Reactive measures to stuff like this is always a bad way to run your business or your client's business.