You do know it is very self serving though yea? It makes no sense at all for 90% of the web traffic. What it does do though is completely remove keyword data and drive more people to AdWords it is not so much oh we are protecting you so much as protecting their own assets and is even more the catalyst that will cause them more headaches in competitors and people having enough of the dictator. Unless you have adworks linked you are virtually blind. John Dietrich
Oh yes Patrick Ryall, I'm under no illusion that Google is altruistic. The interest Google has in serving customers is in keeping that balance between earning massive amounts of money, and not losing customers to other products because theirs is too expensive/doesn't provide the value. Google is an advertising giant, so of course their mission is to get everyone on AdWords.
Thankfully they do have to provide genuine value in AdWords, and customers do actually have to profit from its use.
Also thankfully, Google has to provide just enough of a search experience for users, that they keep coming back..because Google has to have eyeballs on their search results.
True, but to be fair ROI is far better on MS Ads, better conversion and far cheaper. Balancing the incredible spend with AdWords and justifying it is getting harder. Depends on the market and location of course but overall I am quite a fan of the old MS adsystem. You could also easily argue that search experience for business has dropped on G. I know myself what we earnt organically has only gone in one direction over many years and the spend on AdWords has also only gone in one direction. John Dietrich
Google is looking for that point Patrick Ryall, when enough people aren't willing to pay for their ads and when people start having a worse search experience. Once they find that point, they'll pull back or their competition will begin taking some of their real estate. I love the free market, it's all about supply vs demand to find the balance. Regulators need to take their paws off, and let consumers decide.
Not getting a great deal of argument from me there John Dietrich if I had one main sentiment it is too easily gamed to keep competition out. Click fraud really bites into small business, it is up to the advertiser to root it out and ban the IP. If you have market coverage I can also lock you out by simply upping the bid out of your reach, does not cost me the elevated click just the competition if they are silly enough to get involved. Two issues I see everyday keeping small business out of major traffic terms. Cannot say I have not done it myself, the elevated click cost but something does need to be done.
Patrick Ryall moving to HTTPS doesn't have anything to do with Google's keywords or ads, it's all about getting your content to your users in a safe & secure way. For example, injecting random ads & tracking elements into content served by HTTP isn't theory; search for [monetizing wifi] or [in-session ads] for example. If you don't want random other people messing with your site's content (without hacking your server) and monetizing + tracking your users, then HTTPS can help.
Hi John, true enough statements although would Adwords not be encrypted if that was a major reason. Also one would think the others would have already, or will follow suit. The tracking users or even the NSA narrative is a good cover story. All you say is on point cannot argue with that. In session injection is possible, and is also commercially viable (see facebook beemer).
Although concurrently you are in the business of making money and cannot see any company doing things for (the good of all) how long do I need to wait until you release a new version of GA with a premium price for tracking KW data?
From an SEO standpoint, this means whenever a user lands on your site, you have no idea what the person was looking for when landed there or if they found it; and if the customers placing orders, you have no idea what organic keywords are converting into sales, because you can't track that from GAR anymore.
It also means that there is a high bounce rate for a page, aside from doing some landing page optimisation, you cannot make any adjustments since you do not know precisely what the user was looking for when they got to your page in the first place and seemingly didn't find.
You cannot look at referring keywords to try and discover what they were looking for, and how you can change things so that the next user can actually find it.
In so many ways it will breed a worsening of UX so I do say stand by for GAP (analytics premium)
Many thanks for adding your perspective here John Mueller, I certainly appreciate it. Regarding the lack of our ability to understand user intent or behavior from keywords in Analytics, would you please speak to that? Because it's a problem many SEOs are genuinely concerned with and I've not heard any good answers for this.
Regarding queries that lead to you pages, I'd really recommend focusing on search analytics data -- that's where this information is & will continue to be visible. Using the API you can do some fancy things to get more granular information in an automated way too. This isn't something that will return to a HTTP referrer.
My best recommendation John Dietrich is to install http://piwik.org/ it is far more useful than GA and if you are gaining good traffic from Duck, Bing and alike you can cercumvent GA taking most of the insights away. GA is probably one of the less useful analytics systems these days just because it is the popular one does not make it the best fit for really understanding search intent. Of course you can gain (some) insight from Adwords too but again the MS system is far better and again is a must have for so many reasons.
Happy to share John Dietrich it requires a couple of php modules that are not always installed by default. If you have any issues let me know and happy to help. They do have a cloud based option now but have not looked into that but does circumvent the installing locally that sometimes can be an issue.
I'm a fan of log files, so if you want to roll your own analytics setup, that's an awesome choice. Pierre also has some comments on this in https://deliberatedigital.com/blog/measuring-ad-blocking which essentially says that you can get more data by measuring with your own stack. It takes a bit of work, so YMMV.
For none of these you'll get more search keywords though, the referrer query isn't passed through to the site in most cases, it's not that Analytics hides it. If you want those keywords, you'll have to use Search Console/Search Analytics. There are some creative workarounds to combine the two data sources (I don't have any links off-hand, but there are a bunch of them).
As a curious person, I liked the query information too, but in the modern world, I'd be very surprised if this data were to reappear. Find a way to move forward with what you have. Be creative. Be agile. Leverage current technology to do more, to do things better, or to be faster, than your competition.
It is amazing the differance a day can make John Dietrich
ReplyDeleteThanks for the ping here Patrick Ryall, I'm glad to see Google's continued commitment to this.
ReplyDeleteYou do know it is very self serving though yea? It makes no sense at all for 90% of the web traffic. What it does do though is completely remove keyword data and drive more people to AdWords it is not so much oh we are protecting you so much as protecting their own assets and is even more the catalyst that will cause them more headaches in competitors and people having enough of the dictator. Unless you have adworks linked you are virtually blind. John Dietrich
ReplyDeleteOh yes Patrick Ryall, I'm under no illusion that Google is altruistic. The interest Google has in serving customers is in keeping that balance between earning massive amounts of money, and not losing customers to other products because theirs is too expensive/doesn't provide the value. Google is an advertising giant, so of course their mission is to get everyone on AdWords.
ReplyDeleteThankfully they do have to provide genuine value in AdWords, and customers do actually have to profit from its use.
Also thankfully, Google has to provide just enough of a search experience for users, that they keep coming back..because Google has to have eyeballs on their search results.
True, but to be fair ROI is far better on MS Ads, better conversion and far cheaper. Balancing the incredible spend with AdWords and justifying it is getting harder. Depends on the market and location of course but overall I am quite a fan of the old MS adsystem. You could also easily argue that search experience for business has dropped on G. I know myself what we earnt organically has only gone in one direction over many years and the spend on AdWords has also only gone in one direction. John Dietrich
ReplyDeleteGoogle is looking for that point Patrick Ryall, when enough people aren't willing to pay for their ads and when people start having a worse search experience. Once they find that point, they'll pull back or their competition will begin taking some of their real estate. I love the free market, it's all about supply vs demand to find the balance. Regulators need to take their paws off, and let consumers decide.
ReplyDeleteNot getting a great deal of argument from me there John Dietrich if I had one main sentiment it is too easily gamed to keep competition out. Click fraud really bites into small business, it is up to the advertiser to root it out and ban the IP. If you have market coverage I can also lock you out by simply upping the bid out of your reach, does not cost me the elevated click just the competition if they are silly enough to get involved. Two issues I see everyday keeping small business out of major traffic terms. Cannot say I have not done it myself, the elevated click cost but something does need to be done.
ReplyDeleteI'm glad there are alternatives when they make sense Patrick Ryall, for sure.
ReplyDeletePatrick Ryall moving to HTTPS doesn't have anything to do with Google's keywords or ads, it's all about getting your content to your users in a safe & secure way. For example, injecting random ads & tracking elements into content served by HTTP isn't theory; search for [monetizing wifi] or [in-session ads] for example. If you don't want random other people messing with your site's content (without hacking your server) and monetizing + tracking your users, then HTTPS can help.
ReplyDeleteHi John, true enough statements although would Adwords not be encrypted if that was a major reason. Also one would think the others would have already, or will follow suit. The tracking users or even the NSA narrative is a good cover story. All you say is on point cannot argue with that. In session injection is possible, and is also commercially viable (see facebook beemer).
ReplyDeleteAlthough concurrently you are in the business of making money and cannot see any company doing things for (the good of all) how long do I need to wait until you release a new version of GA with a premium price for tracking KW data?
From an SEO standpoint, this means whenever a user lands on your site, you have no idea what the person was looking for when landed there or if they found it; and if the customers placing orders, you have no idea what organic keywords are converting into sales, because you can't track that from GAR anymore.
It also means that there is a high bounce rate for a page, aside from doing some landing page optimisation, you cannot make any adjustments since you do not know precisely what the user was looking for when they got to your page in the first place and seemingly didn't find.
You cannot look at referring keywords to try and discover what they were looking for, and how you can change things so that the next user can actually find it.
In so many ways it will breed a worsening of UX so I do say stand by for GAP (analytics premium)
John Mueller
Many thanks for adding your perspective here John Mueller, I certainly appreciate it. Regarding the lack of our ability to understand user intent or behavior from keywords in Analytics, would you please speak to that? Because it's a problem many SEOs are genuinely concerned with and I've not heard any good answers for this.
ReplyDeletePatrick Ryall If you're asking for HTTP referrers for search queries, that train has long left the station -- I don't see that coming back.
ReplyDeleteRegarding queries that lead to you pages, I'd really recommend focusing on search analytics data -- that's where this information is & will continue to be visible. Using the API you can do some fancy things to get more granular information in an automated way too. This isn't something that will return to a HTTP referrer.
ReplyDeleteJohn Dietrich Great question.
ReplyDeleteJohn Mueller Thank you for the clarification.
ReplyDeleteThanks Zara Altair, I hope John Mueller is able to speak to the keyword in Google Analytics issue since so many SEOs seem left out in the dark on it.
ReplyDeletePerhaps this is his answer, "I'd really recommend focusing on search analytics data"
My best recommendation John Dietrich is to install http://piwik.org/ it is far more useful than GA and if you are gaining good traffic from Duck, Bing and alike you can cercumvent GA taking most of the insights away. GA is probably one of the less useful analytics systems these days just because it is the popular one does not make it the best fit for really understanding search intent. Of course you can gain (some) insight from Adwords too but again the MS system is far better and again is a must have for so many reasons.
ReplyDeleteVery interesting Patrick Ryall, thanks for sharing about piwik.org..I haven't seen that before.
ReplyDeleteHappy to share John Dietrich it requires a couple of php modules that are not always installed by default. If you have any issues let me know and happy to help. They do have a cloud based option now but have not looked into that but does circumvent the installing locally that sometimes can be an issue.
ReplyDeleteI'm a fan of log files, so if you want to roll your own analytics setup, that's an awesome choice. Pierre also has some comments on this in https://deliberatedigital.com/blog/measuring-ad-blocking which essentially says that you can get more data by measuring with your own stack. It takes a bit of work, so YMMV.
ReplyDeleteFor none of these you'll get more search keywords though, the referrer query isn't passed through to the site in most cases, it's not that Analytics hides it. If you want those keywords, you'll have to use Search Console/Search Analytics. There are some creative workarounds to combine the two data sources (I don't have any links off-hand, but there are a bunch of them).
As a curious person, I liked the query information too, but in the modern world, I'd be very surprised if this data were to reappear. Find a way to move forward with what you have. Be creative. Be agile. Leverage current technology to do more, to do things better, or to be faster, than your competition.