Google Making Search More Secure:
Accessing Search Query Data in Google Analytics
Google is forever making changes to its algorithms and at Goy Media, we are constantly adapting our SEO techniques to facilitate such changes. Search is rapidly becoming a more customized experience which is particularly relevant for signed in users.
Googles latest change has seen them look to offer more protection for these personalized search results. As part of their effort, the Google Search team has recently declared that SSL Search on https://www.google.com will now be the default experience for signed in users on Google.com.
This measure has been implemented to protect user privacy though from an SEO perspective there are repercussions which will now affect the search data.
How will this change impact Google Analytics users?
When a signed in user now visits your site from an organic Google search, all web analytics services, including Google Analytics, will continue to recognize the visit as Google organic” search. What will happen is the Google will no longer report the query terms that the user searched on to reach your website.
What is the impact?
Each month at Goy Media we analyse data from Google analytics which provides us with a breakdown of the website visits and the keywords that were searched for to drive that visit to the website. What will happen now is that if a user is logged into Google at the time, we will no longer receive the search query term and it will show up as not provided. This obviously leads to a loss of some important data, but is something that the SEO community must embrace and overcome. The change will affect only a minority of your traffic.
What is Google Analytics doing about it?
Google is still measuring all SEO traffic and will still provide conversion rates, segmentations, and more.
Google has ensured that to identify the signed in user organic search visits, they have created a token called (not provided) within Organic Search Traffic Keyword reporting.
On our monthly reports, the not provided token will now show up a long side all other keywords giving us a % figure for the number of users that were signed in.
