Keyword data not passing through

If a user arrives on your website from Organic Search and the search engine passes the keyword data to us, Attributer will write it into Channel Drilldown 3 and send it to your CRM.

Unfortunately though, this doesn’t happen very often anymore, and in this article we’ll explain why that is.

Why keyword data is no longer passed through

Attributer (and all other analytics tools) use the ‘Referrer’ to help figure out where someone has come from when they land on your site.

If you’ve never heard of it before, the Referrer is a little bit of information passed by the browser that basically says ‘This person’s previous page was google.com’

If you do a Google search, you’ll notice that the search terms you use are in the URL when you land on the results page. See the below example when I search for ‘f1 results’:

So when someone clicked through to your website from a search result, the referring URL (the ‘Referrer’) used to contain the keyword they searched for. Analytics tools would then extract this information and show it to you in reports.

However, as part of the change to the HTTPS protocol (which was the change where all websites had to have an SSL certificate and where your website moved to https://yourwebsite.com rather than http://yourwebsite.com), this referring URL got ‘downgraded’ and no longer contained the keyword data.

So when someone landed on your website, the referring URL was no longer ‘google.com/search?q=f1+results’ and was simply ‘google.com

This meant that analytics tools like Attributer, Google Analytics, etc., could no longer identify the keyword a person used to find your website.

When did this change happen

This change started happening in 2011, when Google announced all searches conducted by users signed in to their Google accounts would be done over HTTPS (which is the one where keyword data is not passed). Bing followed suit in 2015.

What does this ultimately mean for me

Ultimately, it means that for the vast majority of your leads, you will not get any keyword data and will instead get ‘None’ in the Channel Drilldown 3 field when a lead comes from organic search.

This isn’t just limited to Attributer though. All analytics tool (including Google Analytics face the same limitation.

As an example, see the screenshot below from Google Analytics 3 where the vast majority of searches to the site (96% have no keyword data).

It’s even to the point now where when Google released the latest version of Google Analytics (known as Google Analytics 4), they got rid of the keyword report because it was essentially useless.