Google has announced plans to block paid search keyword data, similar to how organic keyword data has been replaced by Not Provided over the past year. This news is being reported by some sources as being a major change to PPC, in reality impact on paid search campaign will be minimal.
AdWords reports will be entirely unaffected, so we will still have full visibility into all the search queries that we are paying for.
What may be affected are certain third party web analytics packages that rely on referral data that is passed from Google. This potentially includes Google Analytics as well, but since an AdWords account and corresponding Google Analytics account should be linked up anyway, the search query data could simply be supplied from the AdWords end.
One knock-on effect may be the time that it takes search query data to become available: via the AdWords interface there is typically a 24-hour lag, compared to analytics which provides closer to a real-time view. If this data is only going to be available from AdWords in the future, it may impact any reports that rely on immediate visibility into the previous days data.
There will also be an impact on any dynamic landing pages where the search term is used to generate content on the page that a user clicks through to. However, Google suggests a simple alternative to this practice which would involve the use of ValueTrack parameters to pull through the keyword instead.
Some third-party keyword mining tools are also likely to be affected, but it will depend in each case on exactly how they collect their data.
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