When a signed in user 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, but will no longer report the query terms that the user searched on to reach your site. Keep in mind that the change will affect only a minority of your traffic. You will continue to see aggregate query data with no change, including visits from users who aren’t signed in and visits from Google “cpc”.
Naturally, a lot of people are very angry about this. What are your views on this?
EDIT: Okay, so now that I’ve re-read my submission the title is a bit misleading. Analytics will still see that a user has landed on your site, just not the keywords they came in from.
As SSL Search is now the default setting for logged-in users that’s an estimated 600M people (number of people using Gmail, I think) who could be logged in and not sending analytic data. Google claims it’s a single-digit percentage
As their blog post shows (and those spawning from it) there’s a lot of angry people who believe that this is a money-spinning move by Google to push AdWords further (as keywords will still show up for those).
Of course there are privacy people who are wondering the opposite side of this… If organic listing queries need to be protected to provide anonymity, why don’t paid ones from the same searches need it too?
As far as the numbers… I’ve seen lots of speculation based on Gmail and other tools but as often as google “randomly” logs me out I’m optimistic
I suppose this is just one of those things where “we will see” applies best. What the real impact is in listing detail and what that means for optimization not just of SEO but site content and development.
