What’s going to change? Natural search keywords and search engines will be under-reported in SiteCatalyst. If you’ve implemented organic search integration in SearchCenter you will see a reduction in organic search term traffic. However, SearchCenter paid keyword data is not affected.

Google engineer Matt Cutts estimates that search encryption will impact less than 10% of organic search queries. To date we have seen that 0.5% to 2% of Google searches are affected, though we expect that number to increase. As a percent of total search traffic, we’ve seen a 0.3% to 1.5% impact.

Rather than hope the 0.5%, 2%, or 10% ratio applies to your site, follow these steps to measure the impact directly:

1. Run the Traffic Sources > Referrers report using the Instance metric

2. Select the current day in the date selector

3. Filter the report to show referrers from major search engines by adding this to the search box: google.com/search OR google.com/url OR search.yahoo.com OR bing.com. Some tips:

• Add non-US domain endings, like google.co.uk, where appropriate
• Don’t forget to capitalize the OR operator
• In SiteCatalyst 14, this search may take a few minutes

4. Note the total in the bottom-right corner of the page (I drop it into Excel, but your memory may be better than mine)

5. Filter the report to encrypted search referrers by searching for google.com/url AND q=& (again, capitalization matters for the AND operator)

6. Divide the second total by the first to estimate the change to total search traffic caused by encrypted search.

Because the google.com domain is used for so much more than search, SiteCatalyst only counts a “search” when there is a visible keyword. This prevents mail.google.com from being counted as a search engine.  Unfortunately, this will also prevent Google encrypted searches from being counted as search traffic. As a result, the following SiteCatalyst reports will be impacted:

• Referrer Types: Search Engine traffic will decrease in favor of traffic for “Other Web Sites”
• Search Keywords (All, Paid and Natural): Metrics associated with keywords will decrease in favor of “None.”
• Search Engines (All, Paid and Natural): Metrics associated with Google search engines will decrease in favor of “None.”

We are currently evaluating changes to the processing platform to improve reporting of encrypted search traffic, though there is no way to uncover the original search query.

Impact on Landing Page Optimization

Google search encryption will affect retargeting and landing page adaptation if site content is customized based on the query parameter. However, because search encryption does not apply to all data, there should be an actionable sample of data for both paid and organic search marketers to perform conversion analysis and landing page optimization (especially since Bing and Yahoo do not offer encrypted search options).

For more information, Search Engine Land has a written a detailed post about Google’s recent search encryption changes here: http://searchengineland.com/google-to-begin-encrypting-searches-outbound-clicks-by-default-97435

The esteemed Chris Haleua from the SearchCenter product management team contributed heavily to this post (in other words, if you don’t like it, blame him).

UPDATE (2): Starting Tuesday, 8 Thursday, 10 November 2011, you will see the term “Keyword Unavailable” in the Search Keywords (All and Natural), Marketing Channel Detail and SearchCenter Organic to Paid Keyword reports. Additionally, any loss in Natural Search attribution for Google in the Search Engines report will return to normal levels. This change will not be retroactive. The gradual decrease you’ve noticed in the Search Engines, Marketing Channel, and Referrer Types reports will jump back up by 2-4% 14-20% (according to most customers I’ve spoken with) starting Thursday afternoon, Pacific Time.

UPDATE 3: The changes are live. You will now see “Keyword Unavailable” in keyword reports and Search channel and referrer types will return to normal levels. If you’re using the Channel Manager plugin, you will need to use an updated version.

We are still investigating the status of Unified Sources DB VISTA rules, and hope to have an update on those soon.

Thank you for the comments on this topic, both here and in the Ideas Exchange.

Many of the new SiteCatalyst 15 features are possible because of improvements to the way data is processed. On your upgrade date, your data is processed differently from that date forward. As a result, segmentation, Unique Visitor counts for arbitrary time periods, unduplicated metrics in classifications, and full subrelations on all conversion reports (to name a few) will be available from your upgrade date forward. If you run a report from before your upgrade date, you’ll see something like this.

With that backdrop, let’s talk about how to upgrade. Here are the steps.

1. Get more information on v15. We’ve provided an outstanding (if I may say so myself) guide to walk you through the upgrade process. The Upgrade Guide is available in SiteCatalyst under Help > What’s New > SiteCatalyst 15 Upgrade Guide. If you do nothing else today, read this (I mean the PDF, not this screen shot).

2. Check with stakeholders. Because we’ve improved the calculation of certain metrics, those metrics will change slightly as of your upgrade date. Check with a few key SiteCatalyst data consumers in your organization to identify the best season or month to take on those changes.

3. Notify your Account Manager. After you’ve read the documentation and are ready to upgrade, let us know. Your AM can provide an initial assessment of whether you’re likely to upgrade in the next few months. During the first few phases of upgrades, we’re looking for specific types of customers, customers that we can ensure will have an excellent upgrade experience, and that will help us learn how to accelerate the upgrade rate. If you’re not currently a candidate, let your AM know that you’d like to upgrade as soon as an opportunity arises. He or she will keep you on the upgrade list and notify you when a slot opens up. (You won’t need to check back regularly, as indicated in the original version of this post.)

We’re working very carefully to ensure that the upgrade to SiteCatalyst 15 is an excellent experience for everyone. We’ve had a very thorough beta, and now we’re keeping track of the first wave of customers to learn what can make the process better for other customers upgrading. We’ll sand out any rough spots and gradually accelerate the number of customers who upgrade each month.

If you have any questions, feel free to post them here or check with your AM.

While this is great news for Adobe’s new customers, you’re probably wondering about the current set of European Omniture gurus? When can you migrate your data to the new data center? And why would a European company choose not to be in the European data center? These questions and answers may help.

Q. Can I setup some report suites in the European data center, but keep others in another data center?

A. The short answer: no. The long answer: not really. For a pile of reasons, our strong recommendation is to keep your company’s data within a single data center. Ask an implementation consultant or ClientCare for details.

Q. Is this related to or affected by Regional Data Collection?

A. No. Regional Data Collection connects your site’s visitors with the closest data collection center, regardless of the data processing center location. If that data processing center is in Europe, visitors in Japan will be sending image requests to our Tokyo data collection center, while visitors in Florida will send data to our Eastern US data center.

Q. When can I migrate from another data center to the EMEA data center?

A. Now that the new data center is running smoothly, our next objective is to provide a migration option for European companies. Keep an eye on this blog for announcements.

The beta versions of AppMeasurement for iOS, Android and Blackberry are available now. If you’d like to participate in the current AppMeasurement beta, ask your account manager to add you to the beta program for “Offline AppMeasurement” or add a comment to the bottom of this post and our beta program manager will reach out to you directly.

Here’s how offline measurement works. You configure AppMeasurement to record while offline, usually a dead simple process. When a user’s phone is disconnected from the web, any data you try to send is queued up on the phone. When the device is back online, the cache of hits are sent to our collection servers, and data collection continues as normal.

What if my app has little or no offline capabilities?

Even if your app has no offline functionality, you still benefit. Users of your app often jump between connectivity states—this enhancement will improve reporting accuracy during those transition periods. However, there’s a more important question which you can now answer, “Should I improve the offline experience for my app?”

To answer this question, simply set a variable with the offline/online state of each hit. Then analyze the percentage of your app visits or visitors that experience an offline event during their app usage. Lastly, weigh the required investment against the percentage of users who use the app while offline. As you can see from the screenshot below, 13% of app users went offline during the month—if this were a real app, you should consider adding offline functionality to improve the user experience.

My app already has offline functionality. Where should I start optimizing?

If your app already has offline functionality, set a variable with the offline status as mentioned above. Then start your analysis by looking at the most popular content by offline status. There are several ways to do this (a sample screenshot has been provided below). You can then fine-tune your offline functionality to favorably impact your key performance indicators.

If you haven’t participated in our beta programs before, this is a great time to start. Beta participants not only get early access to upcoming features, they also help shape how those features turn out, provide direct input to the product development team, and get some incredible beta participation gifts. Okay…so incredible may be a stretch for the gift, unless you count regular phone calls with me a gift.

Our esteemed Ed Hewett, who many of you know and love, contributed to this post.