Encrypted search on Google

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Official Google Webmaster Central Blog: Accessing search query data for your sites

The results of encrypted search is that you can't see what keywords your visitors typed in when found your page in Analytics.

There are some speculations that the keywords will be visible in the paid versions of Analytics.

How do you think this will affect affiliate SEO?

[Notspot]

This must affect 3rd party analytics such as hittail and woopra too then I presume.

This will give google a nice healthy profit. Bah.

Loving Bing a little more each day.

[guruslash]

Pretty terrible news for Webmasters in general!

Looks like it's going to apply for all logged in Google users, which Google claims is only a small percentage of total search - but as someone else said in comments on that post, all Google plus users must be signed in and that market is growing rapidly. So I think initially the impact we will experience might not be "that bad" but over time we are quite likely to lose out on a lot of significant analytics data!!

As for the data being accessible in future premium versions of analytics, I doubt that. That would be like saying we provide privacy unless someone pays us not to provide it...

[Shay]

That would be like saying we provide privacy unless someone pays us not to provide it...

Like saying it and ACTUALLY saying it are not the same.

[parttimepoker]

Shouldn't change too much, you'll still be able to view the aggregate search term data via Webmasters (data that is semi-integrated in the new version of analytics if you link your accounts).

Some conversion data will be semi-unavailable but you'll be able to figure it out well enough from the non-encrypted search data.

Bing is useless.

No way they roll this back for a paid version of analytics, that defeats the whole point.

[Michael Martinez]

It's only a matter of time until someone comes up with a tool to match up those "(Not Provided)" keyword visits with data from Webmaster Tools and SOMEONE will pay them for it.