When Google announced in October 2011 that they were going to make search more secure by encrypting the search queries of anyone one logged into a Google account, analytics users everywhere were reassured that this would only effect 10% of their data (link).
Although this was by no means an ideal scenario for anyone who owns or manages a website – not knowing where or how 10% of your traffic comes from can hamper efforts to ensure your website remains relevant for visitors – there was a reluctant & cynical acceptance. Reluctance because what could anyone do about this change from Google. Cynical because Ad Words users would still get this data; the change would only affect organic traffic.
It could, perhaps, with hindsight, have been the beginning of Google’s attempts to prevent over optimisation by SEO’s by removing ‘exact match’ terms.
However, since Google updated its Privacy Policy on 1st March, all Google services became combined under 1 single policy, the use of encrypted search for users expanded rapidly. In turn this meant the appearance of ‘not provided’ data would also.
Source: Google Analytics ‘Not provided’ 2012
In the example above, ‘not provided’ has risen from 0.9% (February 2012) to 9.1% (April 2012), with larger sites experiencing an even greater increase of 1.5% to 12.8% during the same time period. These figures are likely to only increase, especially considering that Google’s Plus 1 service requires an account login.
The issue of protecting user’s privacy & data has now reached beyond Google, with Mozilla also revealing that Firefox would default to Google’s secure search (likely to be by the end of July). How much of an impact will this have? Approximately 35% of the globe uses Firefox to browse the web (http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp), meaning that an additional 35% of organic visits will no longer have any keyword information.
Is ensuring user’s search information is secure from ISP’s & sneaky governments looking to monitor people’s activity the driving force behind these changes? On the one hand yes but not when you consider that this system has been specifically designed to allow this information to be captured & displayed for advertisers. Preventing both ISPs & governments from getting this data is a bold move & one that may not hold up (especially considering the UK is to spend billions on monitoring website traffic over the coming years) but what about every website owner who could potentially not know how around 50% of their traffic got to their site?
