Comments on: Google Changes Mean Major Implications for Analytics Tools

By: Sean

Sean — Thu, 05 Feb 2009 18:33:50 +0000

Yup exactly. Browsers don’t send the anchor in the referrer string so there’s no possible way for any external service to see the search term. If Google goes fully live with this implementation, Google Analytics will probably be the only service that can give you search terms from Google leading to your site. I think they would probably be sued if this happened, that’s such an abuse of power it’s not even funny.

By: Travis Fisher

Travis Fisher — Thu, 05 Feb 2009 18:30:35 +0000

@Sean – Thanks for pointing that out. I stand corrected. That is what I get for not testing things before posting them on blogs. Sorry for misleading everyone.

So, the problem with Google’s query strings is that they are being parsed as if they are one big anchor tag as Shelby pointed out above.

By: Sean

Sean — Thu, 05 Feb 2009 16:57:31 +0000

Travis that is incorrect. Anchors always go on the very end, even if there’s a query. So in your example this would be the actual URL;

blah.php?foo=bar#bottom

If you tried to do it your way, the entire “bottom?foo=bar” woud be seen as the anchor, not just the “bottom”. Trust me – I deal with this shit every day of my life

By: Travis Fisher

Travis Fisher — Thu, 05 Feb 2009 14:27:08 +0000

@Shelby – # can be utilized for anchor tags within a document, so if you wanted to post a form to “blah.php”, but upon posting it, you wanted to take them to a certain anchor within “blah.php”, the action property on your form could read:

blah.php#bottom?foo=bar

That action would submit the form data to “blah.php”, push the user to the “bottom” anchor within “blah.php”, and pass the data field “foo” via GET.

If Google was using the format above, all would be good with tracking. Instead, they don’t have a “?” and given the position of the “#”, it appears they are using it as if it were a “?”, and that is why the query strings aren’t being read.

By: Shelby Thayer

Shelby Thayer — Thu, 05 Feb 2009 01:23:14 +0000

@Travis – is it the lack of a “?” where the problem lies? I’m under the impression it’s the # that’s the problem. Even if it were #?searchstring I believe the browser still would not pass through anything after the # even if there was a ? with the #.

By: Travis Fisher

Travis Fisher — Wed, 04 Feb 2009 20:18:37 +0000

http://www.google.com/#?querystringhere

That would be valid, and actually make sense when dealing with AJAX (i.e. posting a form to itself), but they are doing:

http://www.google.com/#querystringhere

The lack of question mark is where the problem lies with the tracking issues, but they obviously are parsing the query strings internally using the “#” instead of the “?”, or the search wouldn’t work. I may be wrong, but I would have to think Google has written code behind the scenes parsing these strings, and that would mean it was done on purpose.

By: Shelby Thayer

Shelby Thayer — Wed, 04 Feb 2009 19:46:27 +0000

@Kyle James – Thanks. I was just talking with someone here at work about how it could possibly be a competitive edge for Google Analytics, but it might be because they capture data the way all other javascript-based tools do. So, in essence, they’d be breaking it for their own customers as well as far as we can tell.

@Travis Fisher – I’m not an Ajax expert so I don’t want to say anything wrong here, but yes, that is, in a nutshell the difference. The big problem is that the browser will not pass through anything after a “#”.

Google released a statement late this morning saying that this is a test. It doesn’t say, however, that they won’t roll this out. I can’t see how they can roll this out as is, though. They’d be shooting themselves (their Google Analytics product) in the foot.

Thanks for all the comments. I’ll update the blog as other developments happen.

By: Travis Fisher

Travis Fisher — Wed, 04 Feb 2009 19:35:17 +0000

Am I correct in stating that the problem here is the switching of “?” to “#”? The “search” page should TECHNICALLY be able to be empty (I’m sure that is causing it’s own set of problems), but the switching of “?” to “#” seems like it serves absolutely no purpose.

Has Google addressed the issue yet? Have they said why they made the change?

By: Kyle James

Kyle James — Wed, 04 Feb 2009 19:00:21 +0000

Good detective work Shelby. I had read some of the AJAX stuff but I definitely hadn’t put the dots together like this. Very interesting to see what will happen… could it be a push to help Google Analytics gain more market share… assuming they have some kind of way to still get the keyword data pulled properly?

By: Shelby Thayer

Shelby Thayer — Wed, 04 Feb 2009 17:48:52 +0000

Erin and Wassan – thanks so much for the comments.

@Erin – No, not right now and that’s why everyone is freaking out. Obviously Google Analytics has the advantage here. In my opinion this is an ‘evil’ thing to do.

Stephane Hamel, developer of the WASP Firefox plugin said it best on Twitter in response to a question I had: “I understand use of AJAX on G site, but keeping search keyword to themselves would just be a trick to lock down competitors.”

@Wassan – the “direct” referral traffic won’t be the traffic from Google. Direct referrals are from typed or bookmarked traffic. The referral you’ll want to look for in your results is “http://www.google.com” as opposed to a search query referral like, “http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=trending+upward&btnG=Search.”

Direct referrals will stay the same.

If either of you are on Twitter, take a look at a topic search for Google and Ajax. There is a lot of chatter today. Even if you’re not on Twitter, you can still see the conversations. There have been links to many blog posts on the topic.