Across all sites, 11.36% of organic search traffic has arrived without a keyword set during this time period for the average HubSpot customer. However, some of our users have seen a dramatically greater loss of intelligence than that. 423 HubSpot customers have experienced more than 20% of their organic search traffic getting stuck in this #SSLpocolypse black hole, and 15 others have lost more than 50% of their traffic’s keyword data. For those 438 websites, this change has had a dramatic impact on how they plan their websites’ future content, and how they understand the leads that convert on their website. In order to better understand how different types of businesses were affected by this change, we broke down this data across some of the available metrics we had on these websites.
Are Different Types of Websites Affected Differently?

For one segment, we cut the data set down to only include websites that received more than 500 organic search visits in that week — meaning they were are a better optimized site that contained a greater number of pages. However, the data in this set was very similar. The average customer in this set had lost 10.69% of the tracking on their organic search traffic, with a very small standard deviation of 4.91% and just a 0.09% magnitude of error. If you’re not very familiar with statistics, this means that just 16% (or about 200) of the websites in this data set had lost more than 15.6% of their search engine intelligence. While no individual customers in this set had lost more than 50% of their search referrers, 54 of these 1,255 companies still lost more than 20% of their search intelligence. It is clear that this change has had a dramatic impact on the search marketing and SEO efforts of many businesses around the world.

We also segmented this across companies that were actively blogging vs. companies that do not blog actively. Because companies that are blogging regularly are more likely to be chasing a healthy long-tail keyword strategy, we thought we might see a difference here and that companies blogging more would be losing more of their traffic intelligence. Surprisingly, there was no significant difference here. The average website with a regularly updated blog lost 10.41% of the intelligence on their search engine traffic, with a small standard deviation of 6.34% and just a 0.22% magnitude of error. We also looked at cutting this data across other segments, such as number of employees, B2B vs. B2C, and industry, but we did not uncover any significant patterns or differences. It appears that for once, a change by Google may not have impacted different types of businesses in a dramatic fashion.