Does Google Referral Data Encryption Even Matter? A Forecast for Social Search

Last week Google announced a change to its referral encryption that resulted in the referral data of organic keywords not passing to web analytics tools unless you are running a paid search campaign from Google. Many agree that the referral data not collected now will be in the single digits, but this is likely to last only a short period of time. With the exponential increase of mobile use and likelihood that users will be logged in all of the time the estimate of organic referral data remaining in the single digits is unlikely. Alex Wall discusses this issue more in depth in a recent post from Business2Business, but he does not speculate on who will be the first to be affected by this change. My feeling on this is that small local businesses will be the first to feel the change because of the increased results in local search. In particular, I think restaurants and similar business where mobile users will do a search on the fly for something they need right now will be most hurt. What do you think? You can read Alex’s post on the change here http://bit.ly/tYWKbV