Privacy concerns are cited as reasons for the change, a motive questioned by many in the digital marketing industry since the keyword data is still available for paid search results.
What percentage of users and searches will be affected?
In terms of actual numbers there are no official figures from Google available to say what percentage of traffic will be affected, but we can look at its userbase to get an idea:
- In the UK there are 51,442,100 internet users as of June 2010, 82.5% of the population, according to ITU.
- In the US there are 244,000.000 internet users (Mary Meeker Web 2.0 Summit, 2011).
- Google+ has 40m users (Larry Page, Google Earnings call Q3 2011).
Thinking about other major countries Google operates in and its market share per country, at the very most we estimate around 5% of the search engine's total userbase could be Google+ users.
This is also supported by the John Battelle and Vic Gundotra discussion at the Web 2.0 Summit where they use the figure of 4% of Google’s userbase.
Enough estimates, how about some actual figures?
The only guru worth the name, Avinash Kaushik, has tweeted a custom report ready for Google Analytics you to start measuring the impact of this change. His custom report is available here (click when you are logged into your GA account).
If you don’t want to use that report, or are using another analytics package, then filtering for keywords with “(not provided)” from the 20th October 2011 to date (when the change looks to have been rolled out) will give you some figures.
Looking through Guava’s UK client’s analytics packages, across a variety of sectors, sizes of websites and locations, it looks as if the impact so far is, at best, negligible. The largest impact was just 0.4% of keywords.
Bearing in mind that analytics traffic is never 100% accurate anyway, this looks like it can be totally ignored, for now at least.
However, the HTTPS change is at present only for google.com and so websites with low US traffic will not be seeing a great effect, while the demographics of a website’s userbase will affect this figure. For example, a tech blog about Google can expect a lot more of its users logged into their accounts, and may see a larger impact.
(On Econsultancy, just 0.68% of searches came from logged-in Google users beween 20/10 and 26/10).
Indeed, comparing our results with other fellow Google Analytics Certified Partners in the US, some are reporting the average percentage of searches currently coming in from logged in users at about 1.5%, as @JustinCutroni, Director of Digital Intelligence at Cardinal Path, tweeted soon after the change.
When asked via email on the effect of the https change on his US clients, Justin stated:
We've been looking at the volume of (not provided) over the last week and have seen it fluctuate between 0.5% and 1.5% of Google organic visits. We know this change is going to have an impact but we're still waiting for the rollout to complete.
We're cautiously optimistic that most sites will see no more than 3% of Google organic keywords bucketed as (not provided).
Taking these numbers into account, and considering that 4 to 5% of Google users are on Google+ and assuming that those users are logged in for about 50% of the time, then we can estimate that the percentage of searches impacted could be from 0% (where a website gets no traffic from G+ users) up to 2.5% when HTTPS for logged-in users is fully rolled out.
These figures will increase over time dependent on how successful Google is at increasing market share for its Google+ social product.
Compare this with data loss expected from users who do not enable JavaScript (so rendering users invisible to tracking tags) of 3% in the US and 1.4% in the EU, not to mention data losses of accuracy from cookie loss etc.
Why is Google doing this?
- The push towards HTTPS is not new and Google has been working on it since June 2010.
- Google says it is for user privacy which is a valid reason, if somewhat obscured by the fact the data is still available for users of paid search.
- It's also difficult to see how the present search can seriously be a privacy breach since they are not currently tied to a personal profile. Could this change be a precursor to a change in the way search results are presented for a logged in user? (i.e. within a Google+ profile?)
- The change directly affects other advertising networks and analytics systems because, even with secured connections, there was no requirement for Google to strip the referring keyphrase data.
- It also stops browsers and other search engines (BING) closely analysing the 'clickstream' data of users on Google, as it publicly accused Bing of in Feb 2011.
In conclusion, while the change does represent a disturbing direction for Google Analytics, at the moment it looks as if the impact will not be critical to your digital marketing strategy.