Google Makes Search Referral Data Inaccessible – Update

As an update Google hiding keywords and analytics data, here’s a bit of details.

Users who log in to their Google accounts are being routed through SSL. Their search data shall not be sent to APIs in GA. And that is quite a sizeable chunk. As such, there’s no way of accessing their data. Only users who are not logged in shall have their data available to the inbound market.

Ian Lurid of Portent has explained the real reasons behind this development. Here’s what he says:

It's not about privacy
Don't try to say this is a privacy thing. It. is. not. How exactly does this protect privacy, when you tie the text of e-mails to your advertising platform? How does this protect privacy when you're photographing people's streets, homes and whatever else you can lay your hands on?

The real reason
You've done this for one reason and one reason only: To shut out competing ad networks. By removing this data from the referring query string (oh, you didn't think we'd notice?!) you've made it far harder for third-party ad networks to measure and quantify traffic quality.
Plus, you no longer have to justify ranking results, OR Adwords data. Personalization already scrambles the c**p out of them. Without accurate search query data, we have no way to check your math on Google Adwords search counts.

Here’s a graph of how the number unavailable keywords of unavailable keywords rose last week (Sunday 16th Oct to Friday 21st Oct).