(not provided) hits Google Analytics

Those of you who religiously check your Google Analytics every day may have seen a new entry in your list of keywords and it is (not provided). This seems like a rather odd new value and you may wonder what it means.

Well the Google Analytics blog has made a short statement about what it is:

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”.

This has all come about because Google has announced that default searches for those logged in will come from behind a SSL. https provides a much more secure experience for a user, given that there are a load of personal preferences stored behind the results that the user has made (something greatly extended since the introduction of Google Plus and +1). It means someone doing sniffing on an unencrypted network connection cannot find out things about you based on your search. It also means that your Analytics tool doesn’t know what the search terms you entered are any more (this is all picked up from the referrer information). It’ll know it was from an organic search engine, but it won’t know what the search term is, so it sets it up as (not provided).

Note that many people at the moment will see (other) in their search keyword results in Google Analytics. This is because there are too many unique search terms for the database table, so all the remaining ones have spilled over into a catch all called (other). This won’t change with the new rules.

However the downside is that a load of information is going to be lost in the process (you don’t tend to get referrer information being passed from https to http, so presumably there is some clever frames going on in the background to just give the value). To make up for this Google conveniently incorporated the Webmaster Tools functionality into your Google Analytics recently.

It’ll be interesting to see how other tools deal with this. Will (not provided) become the default? Will this kill SEO as we know it because people can’t link together their search term data with their conversion data? The cynic in me suspects that there will be an increase in people returning to the safe haven of paid search advertising, where you will be able to segment your search results much more efficiently if you have a good campaign hierarchy going on.

This leads us to another question: will Google’s rankings become better or worse? We know they want to move to a situation where the results are sculpted by what you browse, what your friends browse and what people have given as a ‘+1′. Is that essentially saying that it is too easy to game the system at the moment to get your website ranking highly for your chosen keywords?