go-Digital Blog on Digital Marketing

Google’s new Ajax-powered search results breaks search keyword tracking

Source: http://getclicky.com/blog/150/googles-new-ajax-powered-search-results-breaks-search-keyword-tracking-for-everyone

Thanks Sean…

 

 a major update that Google is testing has completely broken the ability for any external analytics service like Clicky to determine the search query used by a visitor arriving at your web site. 

 

 Normally when do you a search on Google or any other search engine, the search term used become part of the URL. A search for Clicky, for example, gives you this:

http://www.google.com/search?q=clicky

When someone clicks a search result on that page, that URL above is sent as the “referrer” to the target site. An analytics app running on the target site can parse the referrer string and extract the word “clicky”, and store that as a search that occured for that site. This is obviously very useful.

Here’s what the new search result URLs look like with the new “Ajax” feature:

http://www.google.com/#q=clicky

See how there’s a hash mark # in there now, and the “q=test” is after it? The problem is that web browsers don’t send anything after the # in the referrer string. This means organic searches from Google will now show up as just “http://www.google.com/”, with no search parameters. In other words, no analytics app can track these searches anymore.

 

Continue reading Google’s AJAX powered search

Tags: ajax, google