Google's algorithms are changing fast and you need to adapt your search tools and strategy to continue to be successful in the new world.
Last September, Google announced that it will eliminate the organic search query data making life miserable for marketers relying on SEO. In April 2014, Google announced that it is going to make the paid search data more secure. This led many to believe that Google is going to eliminate the search query data for the paid searches too.
There has been a lot of confusion regarding this release on what is going away and what is available even after many days of this coming out. I will address this confusion in this post. Before I go into the details, there are 2 main points that you should keep in mind -
- Search query data for the paid search is still going to be available via search term reports in your adwords account
- If you are using third party tools like Adobe etc, this data will still be available to you.
The only thing that has changed over from the past is that Google has changed the structure of referer URL wherein the referer is Google. Earlier upon searching for a query on Google, the referer URL for the page visited would include the search query. This ceases to exist and now the referer URL would not include any search query when originating from Google.
But is it actually a very big deal here? I would say no, because of two reasons -
- The Search terms report within the adwords and all the major third party tools like Adobe's Media Optimizer remains unaffected. So life for an SEM marketer remains the same.
- While the actual referer URL structure is changing, If you still want the referer URL to have the search terms reflected in, for analytics systems to read it and tie it to other reports like pathing and flow reports, Google provides a workaround in the form of ValueTrack parameter.
ValueTrack is a parameter within adwords which once added to the ad's destination URL, mainly tracks the keyword and match type( Broad, Phrase, Exact) upon the click. So although this is not the exact search query data, this is still very very close to that. Using ValueTrack within your Analytics systems like Adobe Analytics, you can get the keyword level data which you can use to tie it back with your campaign data to measure the effectiveness of your campaign across multiple success metrics like ctr, clicks, revenue etc and site engagement metrics like time spent, page views, bounces etc.
Another reason of using ValueTrack to tie the keyword data with the rest of the data within analytics systems is to get the campaign reports faster. Search terms reports within adwords is delayed by 24 hours and the search terms shown are only those which are used within the last 30 days or by a significant number of people. So to get the data for each keyword within the search query, value track provides a much better real time alternative.
