The
dust has settled a bit on Google’s decision to stop passing keyword
referral data from searchers that are logged in to their Google accounts
and using encrypted search by default. That began in mid-October and
then ramped up a couple weeks later.
At
first, [not provided] represented a small percentage of overall traffic
to most of the sites for which I have analytics access. And then it
grew. And grew. And grew.
Today,
[not provided] represents about 25% of the daily referrers to this
blog. But it also represents double-digit daily referrers to
non-marketing/tech sites that I follow.
And
maybe the most head-shaking thing of all is that, in just 2.5 months,
[not provided] managed to become a Top 10 referrer for most of the sites
that I monitor. Here’s a look at three.
Small Business Search Marketing
My
impression is that this blog attracts a mix of marketing
consultants/agencies and small business owners. In both cases, it’s
probably safe to assume that many readers are Google users and also
frequently logged-in to their Google accounts. The [not provided]
keyword referrals bear witness to that.
Not surprisingly at all, [not provided] occupies the No. 1 spot among all keyword referrals for 2011 to this blog. That’s among almost 69,000 different keywords that sent 168,000 total natural search visits.
Related:
On the @U2 forum, which has its own subdomain (forum.atu2.com), [not
provided] was No. 7 on the 2011 keyword referrer list. We also have a
blog on its own domain (atu2blog.com), and [not provided] was the No. 4
“most popular keyword” during 2011.
In other words, this is not just a problem for tech/marketing sites.
Dr. Cynthia Bailey, California Dermatologist
As
many of you know, one of my clients is Dr. Cynthia Bailey,
a dermatologist in California. Dr. Bailey’s target audience is also not
the tech/marketing crowd. Her site offers high-quality skincare products
and solutions to a very mainstream audience; it skews female, but us
guys have skincare needs, too!
And,
much like my mainstream U2 site, [not provided] cracked Dr. Bailey’s
list of the 10 most popular keywords; in her case, it was No. 2 on the list in only 2.5 months.
The Problem With [Not Provided]
In
each case above, with three very different target audiences, [not
provided] made up a substantial percentage of the overall search traffic
to these sites — and the numbers would be higher if I only compared it
to overall Google traffic.
There are ways to use analytics data to help get a general idea of who these [not provided] visitors are. Google’s own Avinash Kaushik has some ideas and examples in this excellent article.
(I
should mention that next month’s SMX West conference has a panel
dedicated to discussing ways to cope with this issue: Life In A [Not
Provided] World.)
But you know what? I don’t use analytics for general ideas and guesswork; I use analytics for specific answers. And Google has taken away a lot of those answers.
For
a number of reasons (many of which Danny Sullivan explained yesterday
on Search Engine Land), the [not provided] keyword referrer is nothing
short of a pain in the arse for anyone who does serious work on the web.
For
me, a blogger who relies on analytics to understand what content
visitors are looking for, [not provided] is more than 7,500 visits that
are a mystery to me — and remember, that’s in only 2.5 months! I shudder
to think what the full 2012 statistics will look like.
For
someone like Dr. Bailey, [not provided] directly impacts the bottom
line. She not only relies on keyword referrals to help decide what to
write about on her blog, but also to understand which keywords drive
online sales of skincare products. And in just 2.5 months, [not
provided] was No. 2 among all keywords that directly led to online sales.
This
isn’t the end of the world for Dr. Bailey, nor for me, but it’s a
serious hurdle to accomplishing our website’s goals. (And it’s a slap in
the face to think that Google’s paid advertisers aren’t facing the same
hurdle, but that’s another post for another day.)
