Google to Encrypt All Keyword Search Data – Creates Panic Chills

Have you heard that Google is moving to hide and encrypt all keyword search data? If you use Google Analytics to analyze the organic search terms that visitors used to find your website and are just hearing the news, you may be feeling a chill of panic. You are not alone.

Marketers around the world are feeling the daunting shock wave of losing access to the precious keyword data that has been traditionally provided through Google Analytics. The dreaded “not provided” will be growing to 100%. Let’s take a look at why Google is doing this and what this means to website owners.

Why would Google Encrypt All Keyword Search Data?

The “not provided” missing keyword data is actually not a new phenomenon, as it has been progressing since 2011. In 2011, Google implemented a major shift inmaking search more secure. When a user signed into the search engine giant’s account, any search conducted would be redirected to https://www.google.com for the encryption protocol SSL (secure socket layer). Google explained then that search queries would be encrypted and that it was a “move to increase the privacy and security of your web searches”. This move was the beginning of the “not provided” within Google Analytics Organic Search Traffic Keyword reports.

Who Flipped the Switch?

Fast forward to 2013 and Google appeared to be quietly moving to expand keyword encryption. The “not provided” keyword search data started to spike indicating that Google had “flipped on encryption for people who aren’t even signed-in.” Danny Sullivan of Search Engine Land reached out to Google in September about the shift and received this response from Google:

“We added SSL encryption for our signed-in search users in 2011, as well as searches from the Chrome omnibox earlier this year. We’re now working to bring this extra protection to more users who are not signed in.”

While Danny Sullivan speculated that this shift might be the result of “US National Security Agency spying thing” or to boost ad sales through Google’s Adwords system, the result is the same. Google’s free keyword data is going away.

When will Keyword Encryption Reach 100%?

The “million dollar question” is when the encryption will hit 100% “not provided” in Google Analytics. According to (Not Provided) Count by ClickConsult, a company that tracks 60 different sites, the not provided data as of October 2, 2013, was up to 80.63%. With this trend, the company is estimating that the not provided stats will hit 100% by November 18, 2013. The real answer is that no one knows for sure.

How Does Google Keyword Encryption Affect Marketers?

SEOs and marketers have used Google’s organic keyword data to measure how effective their organic SEO efforts are and to determine optimal content marketing opportunities. What is a website marketer to do now? Rand Fishkin, CEO and founder of Moz, shared his viewpoint going forward in his article, The First Existential Threat to SEO:

“I believe that in the long run, smart SEOs will find workarounds to backfill for keyword data. I also believe that for every company that shifts their SEO budget elsewhere, another will find that despite the difficulties in perfectly calculating ROI, there is both measurable return and a harder-to-measure increase in serendipitous value. After all, TV advertising has never been perfectly measurable, and it still garners many times the investment total of SEO.”

What Can a Marketer Do Going Forward?

Google’s “not provided” in Google Analytics is not an early Halloween trick. It is here to stay. Going forward, as Rand Fishkin suggested, smart SEOs will find workarounds. Although there are a myriad of articles to help with the missing Google keyword data, here are a few golden nuggets to help you on your way:

• Google Webmaster Tools – If you haven’t set up Google Webmaster Tools yet, now is the time. To locate keyword search data, go to your dashboard and select Search Traffic and then Search Queries. You will see the search keywords that are encrypted in Google Analytics that visitors used to search for and find your website. Note that there are query impressions and clicks as well as average positions. Currently, this is the only accurate way to monitor Google’s encrypted search terms. This data goes back 90 days and you will want to download the data as a CSV file on a regular basis.
• Google Adwords – If you haven’t tried Google Adwords, you may want to try using this PPC (pay per click) system to give some insight on the valuable keywords or phrases that users might use to find a website with services and/or products similar to your site. You will not have access to organic keywords, but the keyword planner suggestion tool will give you ideas.
• Evaluate Other Search Engine Traffic – Even though Bing currently garners only 17.9 percent of the search market share in August 2013 according toComScore, you can still get an idea of traffic driving keywords through Bing’s Webmaster Tools. Bing is currently not encrypting keywords and analyzing the keywords will help you create content going forward.

Losing Google’s keyword data has sent a chill of fright to some website owners. Essentially, we have lost the ability to quickly analyze keyword data through Google Analytics to determine how our content is driving traffic and if our optimization efforts are producing results. It will be a loss, but with every closed door, there are other possibilities and new opportunities.

What are you thoughts about Google’s move to encrypt all keyword search data? Do you have another resource or idea to help fill the void that Google’s “not provided” keyword data has brought? Please share your thoughts in the comments below.

How To Create A Successful Social Business

Are you a social business? By this, I mean are you aligning your social strategy to business goals? In a new Altimeter Group Report, “The Evolution of Social Business“, my co-author Brian Solis and I found that this was not the case. Only 34% of businesses we surveyed felt that their social strategy was connected to business outcomes. Brian goes into detail about our findings in this post.

Our research found that organizations typically go through six stages of social business evolution. But this doesn’t mean that you have to wait until Stage 6 to realize business impact. Rather, it’s not only possible but crucial to focus on achieving business results right from the very beginning. The six stages are as follows (for a deeper dive into each, please download the report):

A great example of this from the report comes from Shell. They launched the Shell Facebook presence only in January 2012 and they mostly post content on the page and moderate comments. But they see tremendous benefit from this activity because their business goal is to understand and improve their reputation with customers and partners. They ask the question, “To what extent is Shell meeting customers’ energy needs in socially and environmentally responsible ways?” The key here is that this is not an effort isolated to Facebook — they measure reputation across ALL media channels so that they can see their activities impact reputation differently. Moreover, they measure this DAILY. Shell may be early in their social business journey, but they make sure that they see business impact from their efforts.

Creating Your Social Business Strategy

The focus on business goals is the key to having a coherent social business strategy, which we define as “the set of visions, goals, plans, and resources that align social media initiatives with business objectives”. That alignment and focus on business objectives forms the foundation for the strategy, no matter where the organization is on their evolution. Just 28% of respondents in our survey felt that they had a holistic approach to social media, where lines of business and business functions work together under a common vision. A mere 12% were confident they had a plan that looked beyond the next year. And, perhaps most astonishing, only half of all companies surveyed said that top executives were “informed, engaged and aligned with their companies’ social strategy.”

But there is hope. we found a set of best practices common across all development stages. We call these the Success Factors of a Social Business: 

1. Define the overall business goal and align social media strategies against it.
2. Establish the long-term vision for becoming a social business.
3. Seek and earn key executive support and sponsorship based on the business case, not the trend.
4. Beyond marketing and service campaigns, develop a list of prioritized initiatives that will demonstrate business value at the enterprise-level and in key functions/lines of business and plot them on a two-to-three year roadmap.
5. Train and educate executives and employees not just how to use social media, but also how social media can impact business objectives and how to develop and run programs that do so continually.
6. Get the right people involved at the right levels. An effective social business strategy takes a unified approach with cross-functional support. It’s a combination of social media savvy and business acumen.
7. Invest in technology only after your vision and strategy are set. Technology and social media in general are only enablers to the overall mission and purpose you set forth.

Applying The Social Business Success Factors

From the research and from our work with clients, we have found that these success factors become especially important when the organization moves from one stage to the next. Some of the most common issues we’ve seen organizations face include:

• Getting executives to buy into the social strategy — and fund it. Factors #1 and #2 which use business goals and a common vision to align the organization, become crucial. Sometimes this can be accomplished with a short education session, but more often, it requires that social strategy be built into the very fabric of the executive’s work and priorities. This is done only by strongly linking social activities to the 3-5 strategic goals that executives care about. If social doesn’t help the executive accomplish their mission critical goals, then it won’t ever make it on to their radar.
• Creating a coherent strategy for social business. As crazy as it may sound, we’ve been working with clients to create three year roadmaps for their social business strategy. That’s not a typo, although it may seem impossible to do this in a fast-changing technology landscape. The key is to focus on the long-term strategic business goals of the organization and to make technology decisions ONLY after the vision and strategy are set.
• Establishing governance. This is the perennial question, “Who owns social media?” This isn’t a simple issue determined by company size, maturity, or industry. It’s base much more on how the organization sees social playing a role in the company in the future, and creating a roadmap to bridge the reality of today to the future. One organization we worked with envisioned a multiple hub-and-spoke model with product and country teams. But to get there, they realized they needed to be temporarily centralized first, move into a basic hub-and-spoke with defined responsibilities, and a migration path for governance to pass into the spokes in a few years after training ensures that the skills and capabilities are in place.
• Engaging and transforming the organization. This is perhaps the most challenging problem facing senior executives — they see the need to redesign and retool the organization for greater flexibility, adaptation to a changing landscape, and resilience in the face of increased competition. CEOs see social technologies as a way to harness and bring together employees, customers, and partners, but don’t have a roadmap to be able to do this.

By keeping in mind where you are in your social business evolution AND using the success factors, you’ll be able to start tackling some of these tricky issues. We’ve seen firsthand that this is not an easy journey, but it is one that you can successfully navigate. I’d love to hear how your journey is going — what stages are you in and have you encountered similar challenges? If so, how has our organization managed to move forward? Add your comments below or send me an email with details — we’re always looking for more case studies!

Google adds hashtags to search results

Google+ continues to grow its influence as a major social network for with the addition of hashtags to search results. Now, when you search for a hashtag on Google, results from Google+ will appear next to popular hashtags.

In general hashtags have been growing in popularity across all major social networks. In May, Google added related hashtags to Google+ streams with Facebook rolling out their own Hashtags in June.

Twitter, Pinterest, and Tumblr are all finding increasing more use from connected conversations, paid media to amplify conversations, and hashtags in Google+ and Google search are one way to further bring relevance to content across all Google platforms.

Google Senior Software Engineer Zaheed Sabur posted on Google+ about the new updates last week, explaining:

• When you search on Google for a hashtag, say [#AmericasCup] or [#WaterfallWednesday], a set of relevant Google+ posts may appear to the right of regular results.
• You’ll only be able to see posts that have been shared publicly or shared with you.
• If you click on any of these posts you’ll go to Google+, where you’ll see the full set of relevant posts.
• You’ll also see links to search for these hashtags on other social sites.Today’s update will be available (initially) to English language users in the US and Canada on google.com and google.ca.

As you can see below, a search of #throughglass on Google pulls up a number of different options, including the new hashtag results on the right hand sidebar. You have the option to scroll up and down through the different pieces of content.

This section rotates through content tagged with that hashtag. Also, you can notice the personalized results present as well. My friend Josh Murdock (who is in my circles) has been exploring the use of Google Glass, and his posts are showing up near the top as well.

For marketers, this new update means that Google+ is increasingly a more important part of your search profile. Content posted on Google+ is clearing getting a valuable piece of real estate inside of search.

With Google’s cleaner redesign this hashtag content takes the space of what could be sponsored links, so this could be an incentive for more users to share content on Google+ when hashtags heat up across multiple platforms.