Has Google shot themselves in the foot?

[Jahangir147]

You may or may not know that in November last year, Google starting “hiding” organic keyword traffic data in the name of user privacy, for users that are signed into a Google account.

What that means is that if you’re signed in, and you search for something, then click on the link, the term you used is no longer passed through to the website you visit.

For the website, that means they have no idea what you searched for.

And the market revolted – marketers around the world were stunned by Google’s ability to, at their own whim, turn off a piece of data that is critical to so many things. And you’d think they would be smarter than that – you’d think they’d consult with people before doing something that impactful. But no, they’re Google. They don’t do that.

Google says it’s only going to impact about 10% of our search traffic.

But many sites across the internet are reporting 20-50% impact. Elephants togo email list 106,610 contact leads and Analytics is actually averaging around 48% of search traffic showing as unknown.

In Google Analytics it’ll show up as “Not Provided”, in SiteCatalyst it’s “Keyword Unavailable”. And let me just clarify, this affects every web analytics platform. It’s not the platform, it’s that the Google Search Engine now strips out the keyword before they pass the user to your site.

In actual fact, it seems that the percentage of impact is largely influenced by the location of your audience. For Elephants, the audience is largely US based – so when I segment by US/Non-US, it’s around 48% vs. 5%. Almost half of the my US audience is apparently signed into Google somewhere. For other clients, the impact is negligible, sometimes as low as 1%.