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.

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Online Marketers Listen Up. There’s Gold In That Data!

Note: This is a cross-post originally from Matt Lillig’s personal blog, Matt is the Senior Analytics Lead at Yahoo!

It happens way too often and it’s painful to watch.  Extra revenue being flushed down the toilet because online marketers aren’t taking a close enough look at what their web analytics reports are telling them.  They’ve spent the time to properly implement their tracking solutions but they aren’t spending enough time in their solution looking for insights.

For online marketers, there could be a whole slew of reasons as to why they’re not paying closer attention to their web analytics data:

• Perhaps a new rep was hired and he/she didn’t realize they had the data available
• Perhaps they have a 3rd party agency managing their data for them
• Perhaps they don’t know how to analyze the data and need a consultant
• Perhaps they’re just lazy and don’t care

While there’s always reasons why one hasn’t looked closely enough, the bottom line is that you have to pay close attention to what your data is telling you so that you can capitalize on it!  Web analytics data isn’t just a bunch of numbers on a page (though it may look like it to some).  Web analytics data provides you with insights such as: who your target audience is, where your roadblocks are, whether or not you’re turning a profit, and who you should be spending your online budget with.

With that said, I want to introduce you to a good example of an online marketer who hasn’t been paying close enough attention to their search engine referral report data.  And because of this, they’re missing out BIG TIME on driving additional revenue to their bottom line.

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