What do Google's Changes Mean For Traffic Acquisition and CPA?

The first thing to say is that Google's recent decision to provide (or enforce?) end do end encryption across search queries will benefit SEO operations, traffic acquisition professionals, and the quality of information on the content.

In the long run.

In fact, a recent Website Magazine article agrees. As does the Keyword Cracker blog.It's actually quite hard to find someone (beyond the usual SEO scare-mongering tactics and anti-privacy activists moaning) who thinks otherwise.

By all means check out this article by the Keyword Cracker blog to get the full details of why it's such a big deal (and it is) but the basic skinny is this - nobody will ever know, going forward, what search terms brought a visitor to a specific page.

So, how will this affect your CPA?

In the world of Search, your CPA measurement (Cost per Acquisition) is more often than not linked to your AdWords spend. It's easy enough to see that, for a given search term, a certain number of visitors have been acquired, and that if you divide your total AdWords spend by that number , you have your first basic CPA metric.

Traffic Acquisition by regular organic search traffic, on the other hand, is more complex, as the CPA for that traffic now has to include the research component.

It's the ability to compare the two (organic and paid) that has changed. In fact, on the basis of keyword phrase analysis it's gone completely, and you can no longer figure out which the better tactic might be, or cross-pollinate from organic to paid search terms.

Tough.

How Does it Affect Traffic Acquisition?

In my opinion, it's just become a lot more fun again. we now can't look at organic search metrics to give us answers, and so, as an industry, we're going to go one of two ways. Back to keyword stuffing more or less at random (urgh), or towards quality content that counts (yay!).

If we bring value to our marketplace, we will acquire visitors, we won't be able to help it. If we acquire visitors, we will acquire customers for our clients. There are a whole lot of ways to add value to the content, and bring that content to the marketplace besides looking at marching figures of organic search metrics.

That's why it's going to become more fun - it will force us to become creative again. A byproduct will be content that enriches the marketplace, and forms lasting bonds; not just promote keywords to get high traffic numbers with little engagement.

Because, as we all know, the true CPA has to include a drop-off component, and reducing that increases efficiency, and hence brings the CPA down.

Don't thank me, thank Google.