Lightburn

(Photo from https://www.google.com)

Ouch! I just pinched myself to make sure I wasn’t dreaming.

This is a nightmare for web analysts and online marketers. Secure Google search means that we will no longer be able to see the referring information of a visitor to our website. That means no keyword information will be sent to web analytics reports! This isn’t only for Google Analytics, not even your $50,000 analytics software will be able to gather the data. Any traffic generated by SEO efforts from a SSL Google search will show up as direct traffic. It’s nearly impossible to measure the success of your marketing efforts if all SSL search traffic is recorded as direct traffic. I’m not sure if they strip out PPC data, but that should be less of an issue due to the growing reporting power of Google AdWords. (more…)