In a range of interviews with The Drum magazine, senior executives across multiple digital agencies are coming to terms with Google's decision to encrypt natural search queries last March; affecting the levels of keyword analysis available to marketers in an effort to protect user privacy.

As Google has muddied the waters of YouTube, Google+ and Gmail users (previously a data goldmine for targeted campaigns) digital agencies are having to adjust their daily work to continue to provide quality SEO advertising. With less natural search data to hand, agency staff must reassess SEO strategy when building client campaigns. Pay-per-click remains unaffected, suggesting Google is after greater paid-search revenues.

Google expect to roll out this SSL encryption to all users, not just those logged in to Google services, which would dwarf the currently affected data - with some analysts reporting an 80% loss of keyword referrals.

Havas Media head of SEO David Freeman believes analysts must find new ways to measure their search data, citing the grey area between keyword bidding and organic methods to achieve greater sales.

"We had forewarning that Google was switching everything to secure search and so we have been using other methods, " he told The Drum.


"Things like Searchmetrics offer market-share data based on rankings, which is useful as it shows how you stack up against the competition. If I get 50,000 visits for X keywords and that drives me X revenue - is that that really useful? Can you make actual business decisions off of it? It’s useful but it doesn’t change much. If you have a client like Amazon for example– given the amount of products they have it could give you an indicator to show you what’s selling and what’s not but they have sales data to give you that – can get a lot of trend data out of your business data.

"When it comes to the integration level clients care very much as that impacts their budget and spend and bottom line in terms of what they are making. For example they can’t now tell whether they should bid on certain keywords for PPC for a number one position, or if they can already achieve the same in an organic position."

You can read full analysis, including expanded viewpoints from Google, DigitasLBi and iProspect in the report here.