web analytics

As you could have previously read on our SEO blog, Google recently announced that secure search would be made as default search experience for signed-in users.

The search company said that less than 10% of search queries on Google.com would be hidden. Recent studies show that this proportion can be largely exceeded.

SEO Experts Don’t Like Secure Search

By enabling secure search for signed-in users, Google actually prevents web analytics and SEO experts from accessing data about search queries.  It means that you cannot see what keywords your website’s visitor typed in the search engine to access your web pages.

This information was really useful for SEO purposes since you could know what keywords your visitors entered in Google search engine.

In addition, knowing users’ search queries enabled you to understand and analyze your visitors’ behaviors, and therefore adapt your SEO strategy. That is why many web marketers actually complained about Google’s announcement.

More Than 10% of Search Queries Affected

Google explained only 10% of search queries on Google.com would be concerned by the secure search update. 

However, SEO tools editor Hub Spot analyzed statistics from 5,600 of its clients and revealed that on average 11.36% of traffic from search engines doesn’t have any identifiable source since the update beginning of October.

And it got worse for 423 clients who saw this proportion increased up to 20%. And for 15 of them, more than half of the traffic from search engines couldn’t be linked to any search query.

Another SEO expert, named Rand Fishkin, from SEO Moz concluded that over 60 websites, more than 12% of traffic from Google was impacted.

In addition, SEOMoz explains that they now have 18.34% of traffic coming from indeterminate search query while this figure accounted for 2.3% before Google’s announcement.

Matt Cutts, Google’s head of spam, continues to stay that this proportion won’t exceed 10% on overall data.

What about your web analytics? Did you see any increase in traffic coming from indeterminate search queries? Feel free to share your statistics.

Google recently announced that web analytics users would not be able to track query terms searched by signed-in people to reach their website anymore.

This announcement will not result in the end of web analytics but will bring significant changes. Many web analytics and SEO professionals already complained about it in the comments of Google Analytics’ blog post.

Google search goes secure

That result is actually the consequence of a decision taken by Google to make the search more “secure”. 

Indeed, the search engine decided to now make SSL search as default search experience for signed-in users on Google.com.

Google that unveiled secure search last year said its aim was to “protect user’s privacy”.

Bad news for web analytics

The main consequence will be that Google Analytics, as well as any other web analytics, will no longer report you the query terms searched by signed in users to reach your website. 

However, this will have no effect for visitors who are not signed in, as well as people coming from PPC (paid search).

Note that signed-in users that visit your website after an organic Google search will still be recognized as so. Conversations rates and other analytics data will not be affected. 

Impacts on SEO

This move does clearly not facilitate SEO work. If your web analytics do not enable you to see keywords searched by users, you will not be able to understand how visitors access your website.

Google said that the signed in user organic search visits could be tracked via the token “(not provided)” within Organic Search Traffic Keyword reporting. 

Please note that referrals will not be affected by this change. However, everybody would agree that this change would not help measure marketing efforts.

Promotion of Google Analytics premium version?

In addition to the release of a real-time web analytics, Google recently unveiled a premium version of  Google Analytics enabling companies to access more resources, process a higher volume of data and benefit of 24/7 support. 

If tracking organic keywords is accessible only to premium users, I think Google would have made a terrible move towards “standard” users.

Following this announcement, I still wonder why:

- Knowing the query searched by my visitors breaches any kind of privacy. I see neither the name of the person, nor his IP address in the Google Analytics reports.  

- Google said it would affect only a minority of my traffic. I am not sure that the percentage of users making a search query while logged in on their Google account is so minor. 

- Google did not give a choice to signed in users by providing them with an option for secure search.

- It is still possible to track keywords searched by paid search visitors. What about their privacy?

- Google is doing evil to webmasters while user experience has always been in the core of their business.

 It would be very interesting to analyze whether this change has any impacts in terms of people using Google Analytics & Search.

I would be glad to hear your opinion about it. Feel free to share your thoughts in the comments.

As a webmaster or a marketer, you may wonder why the reports of web traffics you get from Google Analytics can differ from results you obtain with Alexa.com.

Let me give you some explanations about the differences between these two tools.

How does Alexa estimate website traffic ?

Alexa actually uses a toolbar to measure website statistics. Once someone installed it, the toolbar collects data on browsing behavior which is transmitted to Alexa's website where it is stored and analyzed.

This information is the basis for the company's web traffic reporting but other data sources beyond Alexa Toolbar are taken into account (I guess those could be domain name age, number of indexed pages in search engines, etc.).

How does Google Analytics work ?

Google Analytics works with a 'page tag', a hidden snippet of JavaScript code (Google Analytics Tracking Code) that the user adds onto every page of his or her website. This code acts as a beacon, collecting private visitor data and sending it back to Google data collection servers for processing in almost real-time.

In addition, the GATC sets first party cookies on each visitor's computer. This is used to store information such as whether the visitor has been to the site before (new or returning visitor) and what was the referrer site or campaign the visitor came from e.g. search engine, email etc.

Why Google Analytics and Alexa are different

As you could read above, Google Analytics and Alexa use quite different systems to estimate website traffic, therefore it's not surprising if they obtain different results.

First, regarding Alexa, it's clear that the system has its limits: Alexa largely depends on the number of people using its toolbar. There can be some controversy over how representative Alexa's user base is of typical Internet behavior, notably for low-traffic sites. The largest is the community, the more accurate the data are. Unfortunately, Alexa doesn't provide information on the number of Alexa Toolbar active users (it could be something like several millions).

Second, concerning Google Analytics, the largest potential impact on data accuracy comes from users deleting or blocking cookies. Without cookies being set, Google Analytics cannot collect data. Plus, many ad filtering programs and extensions (such as Firefox's Adblock) can block the GATC. This prevents some users from being tracked, and leads to holes in the collected data.

Another limitation of Google Analytics for large websites is the use of sampling in the generation of many of its reports. To reduce the load on their servers and to provide users with a relatively quick response for their query, Google Analytics indeed limits reports to 200,000 randomly sampled visits at the profile level for its calculations.

As a conclusion, Google Analytics appears more accurate for small and medium-traffic websites than Alexa, but the latter can provide good estimations for websites having more traffic.