In late 2011, Google announced an effort to make search behavior more secure. Logged-in users were switched to using httpS from http. This encrypted their search queries from any prying eyes, and kept from being passed on to websites the users visits after seeing search results. This led to the problem we, Marketers, SEOs, Analysts, fondly refer to as not provided . Following revelations of NSA activities via Mr. Snowden, Google has now switched almost all users to secure search, resulting in even more user search queries showing up as not provided in all web analytics tools. Yahoo! has recently…
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It is astonishingly common that we are asked to analyze the impossible. In perhaps a career-limiting move I’m going to try to do that today (and for a controversial topic to boot!). In this post about an important Google change, I want you to focus less on the data and focus more on the methodology. And – so important – I want you to help me with your ideas of how we can do this impossible analysis better, in the complete absence of data :). So please share your ideas via comments and let’s together make a smarter ecosystem. [Update:…