Remember Wednesday April 9th as a very significant day.
Not because it’s the birthday of the, quite frankly awful, American actress Kristen Stewart, or the date the first indoor Baseball game was played at the Astrodome in Housten, Texas in 1965 (although these are very important events to remember), but because it’s the day Google announced it will begin to block paid search keyword data.
Speaking on Wednesday, Paul Feng who is the Product Management Director for Adwords stated:
“We’ve long worked to keep your searches on Google secure. We provided SSL encryption for signed-in searches in 2011 and have rolled that out to searches from the omnibox in the Chrome browser. Today, we are extending our efforts to keep search secure by removing the query from the referer on ad clicks originating from SSL searches on Google.com.”
However, this isn’t as impactful for paid search specialists as originally anticipated.
So, what does it mean then?
Well, for day to day PPC management from within Google Adwords there won’t be major changes. Most importantly though, search query report data will be unaffected as the data in the search query reports in filtered through Google servers, so remains secure. Essentially, the only significant changes will be that some (un-partnered) third party packages will now show “not provided” in search query reports for CPC campaigns.
Understandably, Google wants to make it’s users searches as secure as possible and this is another step towards them achieving that goal.
For now, as PPC managers our jobs remain largely unaffected. However, who knows when Google are going to throw their next curve-ball, or what it’s going to be. One thing is for sure though, we are going to have to think of more creative and outside of the box methods of analysing paid search data in the future.
