Google: Not Provided Hits Paid Search Queries…..Now What?
It’s a trumor (true rumor)! Last week it leaked on Search Engine Land that like organic search, Google was now going to start blocking query data in Google. Google has since then released that it was indeed true. In the very near future Google will begin blocking or not passing query data from paid search clicks. Google’s reasoning is plain & simple: Security.
What does this mean?
Our first concern was that we weren’t going to be getting in query data anywhere! However this is not the case. Search query reporting within the Adwords UI will remain intact & all the bid management tools we work with will still have access to the API Search Query. The competitive tools that we work with as well have given us the all clear too.
In order to track within GA or any 3rd party analytics providers, since your keyword/query data will come across as not provided, you will need to include ValueTrack parameters within the URL.
Here is what our team’s thoughts are around this:
“It’s not a huge disadvantage since we can still see everything in Adwords. For those using GA to analyze data it will make things more difficult. However if they did ever remove from Adwords, I might cry.” – Sarah Hieronymus, Sr. Account Manager
“It’s great that this won’t be affecting 3rd Party Tracking Systems like Marin and Kenshoo as they should still be able to access the API Search Query Performance Report data from Adwords (if they pull this report directly from the API) even though the data will not be available from Google Analytics.” – Leslie Gzehoviak, Account Manager
“Not much will change in respect to Paid Search pros. No changes in QSRs or API, but only analytics platforms. This will affect the very few relying on parsing SQ data from a referring URL string.” – Yad Bhatti, Sr. Account Manager
“For our fashion retail clients, it was great to see the search query in analytics to compare to the SKU that was purchased. For example, if someone searches ‘HUGO BOSS jeans that George Clooney wore’, we were able to gain some good insights by looking in Analytics to see which SKU people were purchasing. From there, we could add the query as a keyword; create another ad group for it, and direct traffic specifically to the product page containing the pair of jeans George Clooney was wearing. We will be losing this ability.” – Jesse Eisenberg, Manager of Client Strategy
“Not provided killed SEO strategy but doesn’t really affect us. We still get queries from Adwords the same way. The only thing we lose is the ability to dynamically insert a query into the landing page URL–which most of us never used anyway. If anything it just makes running search query reports more important + including ValueTrack parameters in URLs for match type + keyword text.” – Mike Wojciechowski, Account Manager
So Now What…Plain & simple, we’ll be okay & for us at Elite it’s business as usual!
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