Google has recently announced a somewhat unfortunate decision that will affect our ability to track referring organic keywords which visitors use to get to a website through Google Analytics and other traffic tracking software. Fortunately for the panicked Australian webmasters who have been emailing me about this change, this does not affect us yet.
For searchers who are logged into Google, searching on Google.com will now automatically take them to the SSL encrypted version of the domain. What this means for websites who are tracking their traffic, Techalite clients included, is that keyword-specific data for these searches will no longer be logged and viewable in traffic tracking. Instead, we’ll still see that traffic came from Google, but the keyword itself will be shown as unavailable. Again, note the use of Google.com above. I am emphasising this for reasons explained later in this post.
Google claims that they expect this to impact up to about 10% of traffic that websites get (less depending on the industry). Regardless, with the amount of effort they’re putting into ensuring that users are logged into Google via Gmail, Docs, Google+, YouTube, and other Google services, more and more people are going to be logged in when searching as time goes on – making this very inconvenient to webmasters who rely on being able to view visitor data.
How this affects Australian websites
Thankfully for our Australian clients, SSL right now is only available on google.com, not google.com.au, which is what the majority of Australian searchers use. Most of Techalite’s clients being small Australian-based businesses (hi guys!), the vast majority of their traffic comes from google.com.au searches, which is exactly the target we’re aiming for. However, Google state that they are actively working on making SSL available throughout all domains. When this happens, we can expect to see similar behaviour for logged-in searchers on Google.com.au. When this will happen, we don’t know – the best we can do is “eventually”! For now – don’t panic – your analytics are not changing yet.
I will create a follow-up post on how much effect this would have when SSL is introduced to Google.com.au later on. For now, this is more of an emergency update to give you guys a gist of what’s actually happening.
{ 1 comment… read it below or add one }
Nice informative post there Liza and whilst a large majority of Australian SME’s won’t be impacted now, as Google continue to grow their product base and we see more Australian’s logged in… it’s got to be something to be concerned about. Anyway, this is my first time visiting your blog as a fellow SEO in Australia
*waves*