Analyzing impact of Google’s SSL Search

Posted: November 18th, 2011

It’s been a little over a month since Google announced that it will be providing SSL searches for it’s logged in users and as Result of that we will lose some of our Organic Search Data, we covered this in a bit more detail HERE

So now that the initial craze has settles we decided to look at some sample data and look at what’s actually going on and how it is really affecting us and our Brands.

We decided to use 6 Sits from different verticals as a sample; we decide don the following verticals:

• SEO Company (since Visitors are obviously engaged in Google, we assume that they logged in)
• Home Cleaning Products Manufacturer
• Financial Service Company
• Home Electronics
• Healthcare Services
• News & Gossip Site

This gives us a good look at a very wide spectrum of sites and users.

 

Type	Total Visits	Organic Visits	Hidden Keyword	Chrome Total/Hidden
SEO Company	3778	1322	299 / 22.62	11% / 45%
Cleaning Products	293693	26474	1632 / 6.16	13% / 35.36 %
Financial Services Company	228688	54510	2608 / 4.78	25% / 47.35 %
Home Electronics	338140	49977	3.382 / 6.77	16% / 48 %
Healthcare	133730	20240	2679 / 13.24	9% / 18%
News / Gossip Site	35558	26121	419 / 1.60	34% / 42%

So what did we find?em>

The first thing just as we suspected is that SEO / Tech & Computers users are Google users, therefor logged in and will be using the SSL search. This was confirmed with 22% of searches being hidden.

Another interesting fact is that Google actually seems to be serving them smart. One of the sample sites is a healthcare site, and without giving away too much, it is not a modern medicine, it targets elderly people and we are fairly certain they do not have a Google account (80% of their members have ISP emails such as Comcast, Verizon, AOL etc). Based on the analytics sample data it seems that Google hid 13% of the keywords.

We need to keep one thing in mind, Google does this to protect users privacy and not to mess with us internet marketers ‘)

On the flip side it is fairly interesting that Google does not hide the info from a financial services site, but this might be due to the fact that most of their site is already served over https

Also we were expecting to have a higher amount of hidden KWs on the home electronics site. More hen 50% their member emails end in @gmail

Conclusions?

So without upsetting any hardcore Internet marketers, it does seem that there is more behind the decision process on Google’s side then just are you logged in or not.

After compiling this I looked at a few more healthcare and medical related sites, and it seems that across all of them there is a really high rate of hidden keywords as well, some even up to 50% and all of those sites are targeted towards elderly people, not your usual google crowd!

Another Interesting find is the high number of Chrome share among the hidden keywords, it seems that the browser is a deciding factor as well.

thoughts?

Benjamin Spiegel @ Google+ 1 Comment »

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