iFinity

Something that quietly slipped past a lot of people at the start of November was the announcement from Google that was rolling out SSL Search for all logged-in Google users.

This can be broken down like this:

- SSL Search means that the search session is conducted over https

- logged-in Google users covers the universe of people who are logged into a google service, such as iGoogle, Google+, Gmail – plus a whole pile of others.

- SSL Searches do not provide the Keyword data in the referer value for a click-through from Google

This fact that SSL searches do not pass the search query data (ie, the keywords used) onto the site that is clicked on has a very large impact on Analytics packages, which collect that data and summarize it for analysis.

This means that data using any Analytics package (not just Google Analytics) will no longer provide keyword data for some Google searches.

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