Major Google Analytics fail | Hacker News Reader

Major Google Analytics fail

adtrak.co.uk

9 pointsjamieandrews7 comments

If i'm using "secure" search, I would expect my queries to not be sent to an analytics system.

Meh, who knows that they are using 'secure' search just because they are signed into their Google account? Fair enough if people were explicitly choosing that, but it's just a side effect of being signed in.

On the other hand, I see this as a win for user privacy and a blow to the kind of keyword-stuffing SEO that I hate. There's more than one perspective here.

True, but it would have been nice/reassuring if Google had presented it as that and notified Analytics users of the change and the privacy rationale for it. As it is, it's just confusing and I had to search around to find out what's going on.

Also, note that Google is blatantly still serving you ads on the basis of what you're searching for, just no longer sharing that with Analytics users. So the privacy win is minimal.

This is completely lame and must surely be unintended by Google. The situation is that increasing adoption of one of their main products (Gmail/Googleapps) directly impacts on users of another major product (Analytics).

If everyone using Google search was signed into a Google account when searching, then there would be no keyword data at all for Google searches in Analytics. Already, keyword "(not provided)" is the second largest category in the organic traffic for my site.

This is a classic sign of a company that is the opposite of lean/nimble, falling over itself to the detriment of its customers...

(not provided) is #1 for one of our sites with ~51% (~8,000,000 visits) and again #1 on another site with 35% (~7,000,000 visits).

More annoyingly, they even disguise the referrer for SSL sites, where it wouldn't be sent to anyone intercepting the connection.

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