Almost a month ago Google removed the keyword referral data for searches made by logged in Google users.  At the time Matt Cutts estimated that the overall effect as a percentage of the overall keyword data would be in the single digits. WRONG! At least for me.

My initial test for the couple of days it had been running when I wrote the first article showed minimal effect, along the lines of Matt Cutts’ statement. However as my weekly reports came in, I found that “(not provided)” was always on top, and was an alarmingly high percentage of the total. So high, in fact, that the data was functionally useless to me. In fact, over the month since the keyword referral data has been removed, the total percentage that is “(not provided)” is 24%.

So, think fondly of the days when Google supplied you useful data that would help you improve your web site promotion efforts and better serve  your business, customers and partners. Google just poked you in the eye!

Hey, maybe NOW you’ll start using Adwords!

Google announced on Tuesday that it would be removing keyword query data from Google referrals for searches performed by users logged into their Google account. The reason given by Google was to protect user privacy. “ Protecting user privacy is important to us” states Amy Chang or the Google Analytics team, on the Google Analytics blog post announcing the change.

However, Google is NOT protecting the privacy of those logged in searchers who click on a Google Adwords paid ad. Their keyword data will still be transmitted to paid advertisers’ Google Analytics accounts. Aaron Wall wrote a great post on the hypocrisy of Google’s ham-handed PR.

The bottom line is that businesses will no longer be able to see all keywords that are bringing visitors to their website. The amount of data effected, I assume, will depend on what percentage of Google searches are done by logged in users, and I didn’t have a good feel for that number initially (according to Matt Cuts it will be in the single digits).

I took a look at the stats for this website (http://www.pleasantonwebdesignblog.com/) and saw a new search term named “(not provided).”

So for the three full days for which I have keyword data that is marked  (not provided), slightly less than 4% of my total keyword data was  effected.  Not a big deal to me. So while there is potential for Google Analytics to lose it’s value over this issue, I’m not seeing it right now.

Here’s a quick post to help you add Google Analytics tracking code to your phpLD (php link directory) template. Because phpLD uses the Smarty templating system, simply opening the footer.tpl and placing the Analytics code before the closing body tag will result in an error. You need to tell Smarty not to parse the code between the script tags. To do so, open your templates/footer.tpl file, and right before the closing body tag, place your Google code like this:

{literal} Your-Analytics-Code-Here{/literal}

Now save and put. That’s it!

This is more of a rant than a tutorial, so forgive me if you are searching a solution and this doesn’t help you.

As far as open source web applications go, Elgg is pretty difficult to work with. It’s buggy, there are a lot of compatibility problems, and support from the development team and the community is less than stellar. The application is, however, very powerful, and has many functions that make it the best choice, in my opinion, for an open source social networking web application.

After some difficulty, I got my installation at http://www.fanclubhelper.com up and running. Being afraid to touch it again, for fear I’d open up a can of worms, I didn’t make any modifications for over a year. In that time, however, the site started ranking well in some searches I’m interested in, and it was now time to install Google Analytics, to see how the traffic was doing.

In most open source software applications I’ve used, in order to make changes, such as adding Google Analytics tracking code, you edit the template file. So I went to /mod/template/templates/MyTemplate/pageshell and pasted the Google Analytics code before the closing body tag. In checking the live site, however, the code was not installed.

Since the closing body tag needs to be coming from somewhere, I took a shot in the dark and added the Google Analytics code to the pageshell file of the default template. That worked, but I have no idea why. It also had the side-effect of putting some text over my logo where it wasn’t before. I can only guess that one of the pageshell templates I put was different on the server than my local copy, and I forgot about it during the year of inactivity. Another ELGG mystery that I’d rather not get into. It’s working well enough, so no touchy!!