Invoca Summit Virtual | Oct 5-6 2021

Invoca earned the highest score possible in 13 criteria including:

  • Product and Technology Innovation Roadmap
  • Supporting Products and Services
  • Partner Ecosystem
  • Ease of Use
Get the Report →

DialogTech is now Invoca. Learn about the benefits of Invoca's AI-powered conversation intelligence platform here →

Bing Announces Encrypted Search; Here Are Four Alternative Ways to Unlock Organic Search Keyword Data

DialogTech

Yesterday, Bing announced that they will begin encrypting search data as they switch over from http://www.bing.com to secure https://www.bing.com. Bing is following suit after Google’s [not provided] switch to secure search in 2013.

After Bing pushes this change (sometime this summer), webmasters will no longer be able to view search query terms in Webmaster tools. Limited search term data will be available in the Bing Ads “Search Query Terms Report” as well as in Bing Webmaster Tools, according to Senior Product Manager at Bing, Duane Forester.

As marketers move closer and closer to 100% encrypted search data, it’s important for us to remember that despite the increase in mentions of [not provided] in our analytics tools, there are other ways to attribute organic website traffic to the terms people use to find our businesses. Gleaning that insight is often key to optimizing existing marketing campaigns and planning future ones.

For DialogTech customers and marketers alike, this changes means that you will need to use other tools to view and analyze organic search keyword data. However, let’s be clear: this change only impacts Bing organic search and does not have any impact on Bing Ads.

Ranking and Webmaster Tools

Rankings are a good indication of the keywords organic searchers are using to find your business. For most well structured web pages, there are only a few keyword terms and variations that would trigger the page to appear in an organic search. The search keywords report in Bing Webmaster tools can help you understand the relationship of your web pages to specific search terms by showing you the top organic queries and top web pages. The report contains the queries used to access your website along with clicks, CTR, average position and the served pages in relation to those keywords (see below). It is unclear how this Bing report will change with the secure switch.

Organic Search Keywords

Google Webmaster Tools has a Search Analytics report that shows organic queries and the number of clicks to your website from those queries. However, this list does seem limited when comparing the number of clicks listed in the report vs. the number of visits from organic search to my website. It is still helpful to use this report for mining new keyword ideas.

Search Queries in Bing Ads and Google AdWords

Bing Ads and Google AdWords have search terms that provide search marketers with more insight into the specific keywords users are searching. With these reports you can select a keyword you are bidding on, pull the search terms report for it, and you will see a list of all the terms that were used to trigger your paid keyword. This is a great way to understand how users are searching for your products or services, and it’s also a great way to build keyword lists for both organic and paid search.

Also, since the switch to secure search doesn’t impact Bing Ads, so you can still view keyword-level referral data in the Bing Ads interface.

Events Flow in Google Universal Analytics

Google Universal Analytics Events Flow report provides a solution to the issue of missing keyword data. Events Flow guides you through the path a visitor took on your website – you can see the landing page the visitor first hit (and the source that drove it i.e. Bing, Google, Yahoo) along with the events and interactions they took following that initial visit to your landing page. We touched on the relevance of this report back in 2013 when Google fully rolled out the [not provided] secure search in Google Analytics.

Call Tracking Software

In today’s mobile world, 42% of organic search visits are from mobile devices (Merkle/RKG, 2015) and that number is growing fast. Thanks to click-to-call, when these organic search visitors convert, they often do it with a phone call rather than a form fill. Marketers who use DialogTech’s call tracking software are able to reach an additional layer of keyword attribution, albeit somewhat indirectly, and DialogTech customers will still have access to full keyword attribution for Bing Ads. Let me explain:

Even though Bing will no longer pass organic keyword referral data into analytics platforms, marketers can use DialogTech call analytics to see the initial page a visitor landed on and then track their entire web visit through to the call they place to your business. Knowing the initial landing page a visitor hit is important in optimizing SEO – since you can infer the keyword(s) a user searched to hit your mobile-optimized page by analyzing the content of that web page. You can then use the call analytics to optimize your keywords and landing pages to drive more call conversions.

Let’s also note the importance of attributing sales and revenue data from your CRM to calls. This is the most accurate representation of ROI for most businesses. DialogTech’s call tracking software allows our customers to capture and attribute unique information about each caller and pass that data between systems along with the source of the visit. DialogTech also integrates call attribution data with analytics tools like Google Analytics, Universal Analytics, and Adobe Analytics, in addition to our own reports on Bing organic search.

To learn more about tracking calls from organic search get the free guide, “Marketer’s Guide to Call Tracking for Local Search.

Despite the major search engines’ shifts to secure search, there are many ways marketers can access organic search keyword data to optimize campaigns. It’s just about having the knowledge of and access to the right tools.