The Impact of Google Encrypted Search

Let’s start with a sum­mary of what you’ve been read­ing. In an effort to make “search more secure,” Google is encrypt­ing more search queries through SSL. Searchers signed-in to a Google account are redi­rected to https://​www​.google​.com (notice the s) and (here’s the rub) search key­words are stripped from the refer­rer [cor­rec­tion fol­lows] when a nat­ural key­word is clicked. The typed key­word is hid­den from you and your site opti­miza­tion sys­tems (that’s us).

What’s going to change? Nat­ural search key­words and search engines will be under-reported in Site­Cat­a­lyst. If you’ve imple­mented organic search inte­gra­tion in Search­Cen­ter you will see a reduc­tion in organic search term traf­fic. How­ever, Search­Cen­ter paid key­word data is not affected.

Google engi­neer Matt Cutts esti­mates that search encryp­tion will impact less than 10% of organic search queries. To date we have seen that 0.5% to 2% of Google searches are affected, though we expect that num­ber to increase. As a per­cent of total search traf­fic, we’ve seen a 0.3% to 1.5% impact.

Rather than hope the 0.5%, 2%, or 10% ratio applies to your site, fol­low these steps to mea­sure the impact directly:

1. Run the Traf­fic Sources > Refer­rers report using the Instance metric

2. Select the cur­rent day in the date selector

3. Fil­ter the report to show refer­rers from major search engines by adding this to the search box: google​.com/​s​e​a​rch OR google​.com/​url OR search​.yahoo​.com OR bing​.com. Some tips:

• Add non-US domain end­ings, like google​.co​.uk, where appropriate
• Don’t for­get to cap­i­tal­ize the OR operator
• In Site­Cat­a­lyst 14, this search may take a few minutes

4. Note the total in the bottom-right cor­ner of the page (I drop it into Excel, but your mem­ory may be bet­ter than mine)

5. Fil­ter the report to encrypted search refer­rers by search­ing for google​.com/​url AND q=& (again, cap­i­tal­iza­tion mat­ters for the AND operator)

6. Divide the sec­ond total by the first to esti­mate the change to total search traf­fic caused by encrypted search.

Because the google​.com domain is used for so much more than search, Site­Cat­a­lyst only counts a “search” when there is a vis­i­ble key­word. This pre­vents mail​.google​.com from being counted as a search engine.  Unfor­tu­nately, this will also pre­vent Google encrypted searches from being counted as search traf­fic. As a result, the fol­low­ing Site­Cat­a­lyst reports will be impacted:

• Refer­rer Types: Search Engine traf­fic will decrease in favor of traf­fic for “Other Web Sites”
• Search Key­words (All, Paid and Nat­ural): Met­rics asso­ci­ated with key­words will decrease in favor of “None.”
• Search Engines (All, Paid and Nat­ural): Met­rics asso­ci­ated with Google search engines will decrease in favor of “None.”

We are cur­rently eval­u­at­ing changes to the pro­cess­ing plat­form to improve report­ing of encrypted search traf­fic, though there is no way to uncover the orig­i­nal search query.

Impact on Land­ing Page Optimization

Google search encryp­tion will affect retar­get­ing and land­ing page adap­ta­tion if site con­tent is cus­tomized based on the query para­me­ter. How­ever, because search encryp­tion does not apply to all data, there should be an action­able sam­ple of data for both paid and organic search mar­keters to per­form con­ver­sion analy­sis and land­ing page opti­miza­tion (espe­cially since Bing and Yahoo do not offer encrypted search options).

For more infor­ma­tion, Search Engine Land has a writ­ten a detailed post about Google’s recent search encryp­tion changes here: http://​searchengineland​.com/​g​o​o​g​l​e​-​t​o​-​b​e​g​i​n​-​e​n​c​r​y​p​t​i​n​g​-​s​e​a​r​c​h​e​s​-​o​u​t​b​o​u​n​d​-​c​l​i​c​k​s​-​b​y​-​d​e​f​a​u​l​t​-​9​7​435

The esteemed Chris Haleua from the Search­Cen­ter prod­uct man­age­ment team con­tributed heav­ily to this post (in other words, if you don’t like it, blame him).

UPDATE (2): Start­ing Tues­day, 8 Thurs­day, 10 Novem­ber 2011, you will see the term “Key­word Unavail­able” in the Search Key­words (All and Nat­ural), Mar­ket­ing Chan­nel Detail and Search­Cen­ter Organic to Paid Key­word reports. Addi­tion­ally, any loss in Nat­ural Search attri­bu­tion for Google in the Search Engines report will return to nor­mal lev­els. This change will not be retroac­tive. The grad­ual decrease you’ve noticed in the Search Engines, Mar­ket­ing Chan­nel, and Refer­rer Types reports will jump back up by 2–4% 14–20% (accord­ing to most cus­tomers I’ve spo­ken with) start­ing Thurs­day after­noon, Pacific Time.

UPDATE 3: The changes are live. You will now see “Key­word Unavail­able” in key­word reports and Search chan­nel and refer­rer types will return to nor­mal lev­els. If you’re using the Chan­nel Man­ager plu­gin, you will need to use an updated version.

We are still inves­ti­gat­ing the sta­tus of Uni­fied Sources DB VISTA rules, and hope to have an update on those soon.

Thank you for the com­ments on this topic, both here and in the Ideas Exchange.