360i has released a new report that measures the impact of Google Secure Search following Google’s announcement last fall that it would make secure search the default setting for all logged-in users. With secure search, a person’s search terms cannot be tracked by the third-party technologies that marketers have come to rely on to determine how natural search terms drive actions within websites.
This shift to an encrypted search model drastically impacts marketers’ ability to see details about the origin of natural traffic at the keyword level. As a consequence, marketers are losing the ability to track the performance of some keywords, thus losing a share of data previously used to inform SEO strategy.
Google estimated that the change would create a data loss of 10 percent, but proprietary research from our own SEO team found that this figure is actually closer to 20 percent. The report below outlines this research and shares several important next steps for marketers.
