In an announcement today, Google announced that Paid Ad Clicks will no longer have the keyword query and it is part of their security enhancement that started rolling out in 2011, starting from their organic.
What does that mean?
- All Ad Clicks is made SLL secure by default for everyone.
Prior to that, only organic search queries were impacted by the Secure search SSL impact. - It makes search queries private from any potential eavesdroppers, and making it harder to intercept by agencies like the NSA.
- Building dynamic pages and content based on referring incoming keywords will be impossible.
- There will be functionality that you have within Google that was easily available and it will be no longer available.
Google is downplaying this and mentioned that “Advertisers will continue to have access to useful data to optimize and improve their campaigns and landing pages.”
- Suggestion to optimize can be done via search term report which limits it to 2,000 keywords. This will not impact you if you don’t have a high spend account, but if you generate thousands of clicks per day – the query reports will not cut it.
- API – if you have the technical know how, you can build an API to pull the query data, or scripting functionality that was part of the Google Enhanced Campaign launched in 2013.
It is great that Google is working to make it a better experience for consumers and keep out the eavesdroppers, but for legitimate marketers – it is just a monkey wrench in their SEM campaign.
