Gauging the Impact of Encrypted Searches in YWA

Google’s announcement that it will be encrypting searches for their signed in users has been widely covered in the search marketing and web analytics community.  Yahoo! Web Analytics is also affected and we expect the total volume of search queries to diminish based on the % of queries Google withholds the query term from.  This will vary from site to site depending on how much you rely on organic vs. paid search results to generate traffic.

Since this change is a reality, we analysts need to deal with it and one of the first steps we can take is to calculate what percent of our Google search traffic is encrypted and thus not providing any keyword data.  This new metric can be called “Lost Keyword Data” and is something that should be tracked over time and included with your keyword reports.

To calculate this “Lost Keyword Data” in YWA we will create two custom segments that we will compare against each other.  One will show traffic generated by Google that doesn’t provide keywords and the other will show the total traffic sent by Google.

Start by creating a custom segment and adding two dimensions: 1. “Search Engines equals “Google” 2. “Search Phrases is empty.”

Then save this custom segment so that you can quickly apply it to reports across YWA:

Using the same technique we’ll create and save a segment for all Google searches:

Now I can use the “Compare Segments” functionality of YWA along with the two custom segments I created to directly compare the impact that encrypted searches has had:

Here is how these segments compare on a basic Visits report for the previous 12 week period:

Next we’ll export this table to Excel to calculate the percentages:

I have now quantified exactly how much impact this change by Google has had on my site.  In this instance I can see that the percentage of encrypted Google searches (Lost Keyword Data) has gone from a 1/2 percent to 6 percent from October to November!  This is certainly a trend I’ll be keeping an eye one and falls in line with what has been seen by other analysts on the sites they monitor.

3 Responses to “Gauging the Impact of Encrypted Searches in YWA”

1. Nathan Safran says:

   November 29, 2011 at 9:10 am

   Hi Tony,

   Great post, and thanks for linking to Conductor’s research on the impact of encrypted search. We’ve recently posted an update that shows the percentage grew to 8.75% and also provided more detail on a site by site basis:

   http://www.conductor.com/blog/2011/11/update-on-google-encrypted-traffic-8-875-of-google-traffic-now-not-available/

   Nathan Safran
   Senior Research Analyst
   Conductor, Inc
2. eBrandz says:

   November 29, 2011 at 11:02 pm

   Nice custom report to show the impact.
3. Nick Andrews says:

   January 13, 2012 at 8:09 am

   A very interesting segment to create in YWA – across a number of our client sites we are seeing encrypted searches accounting for approx. 5% of traffic.