We are pleased to announce that Nathan will be a regular contributor at Search Engine Watch. Look out for his monthly article there. In addition, he will also be a regular contributor to SearchEngineLand.

The findings help to confirm what most multi-channel markets likely already suspect and struggle to prove: The offline impact of search marketing is grossly undervalued in any ROI calculation that does not include sophisticated attribution modeling.

Retail marketing firm RevTrax recently published an interesting study on the impact of search marketing activities on in-store purchasing.  The study focused on millions of Paid Search ads RevTrax monitored and the consequent sales for its retail clients. To track in-store sales accurately RevTrax used landing pages with coupons and unique IDs:

1. A paid search ad was displayed to a consumer
2. The paid search ad led the consumer to a printable or mobile landing page displaying a coupon with a unique barcode
3. The consumer redeemed the coupon inside a brick & mortar store
4. Each coupon was tracked back to the online search (and the keyword)

Measuring Offline Customer Behavior

The study claims it is the first to show the offline impact of paid search marketing based on actual behavior rather than consumer surveys and self-reported data.  The findings show that “for every $1 of e-commerce revenue generated from paid search, marketers can expect to see approximately another $6 of in-store revenue.”

Other findings include:

• The average click on a paid search ad generated approximately $15 of in-store revenue, with some merchants seeing as much as $28 of in-store revenue.
• Approximately 9% of clicks on a paid search ad generated an in-store sale, with some merchants seeing up to 26% of clicks on a paid search ad generating an in-store sale.

The overarching argument RevTrax makes with the research is that “multichannel merchants who do not include in-store sales into the ROI calculation are potentially undervaluing the paid search channel by as much as 85 percent.” The findings help to confirm what most multi-channel markets likely already suspect and struggle to prove conclusively to the executive suite: the offline impact of search marketing is grossly undervalued in any ROI calculation that does not include sophisticated attribution modeling.

New vs. Existing Customers

Some question was raised in the comments of the SearchEngineLand writeup as to the mix of branded vs. non-branded keywords, and the percentage of customers that are new and discovered the brand via the search ad and could therefore be counted as true incremental revenue.   A postscript to the article indicates around half of customers are new and keywords analyzed were a mix of branded and non-branded keywords.  This suggests some of the lofty numbers ($6 in local sales for every $1 in online sales) may be somewhat aspirational, but what is clear is that there is some strong measure of offline impact from online search visibility.

Leverage Study to Push for Greater Natural Search Budget

In reading through the study writeup, one could easily imagine Paid Search Managers the world-over going study-in-hand to Management to ask for more budget.

“Look,” they might say, “not only will increasing our budget bring us more site visitors and sales, but it will also impact our offline channel.”

Given that Comscore states up to 92% of click activity occurs in natural search, and eye tracking studies show searcher attention on the SERP is primarily on natural listings, we can’t help but make an analog from the study’s PPC findings to natural listings.

Could SEO Managers take the study-in-hand to management together with some of the established industry statistics on natural vs. paid click activity to ask for additional budget?  Could they say “it’s reasonable to infer that the findings of offline sales return from PPC investment could be applied to natural search listings?”

Given the focus of searchers on natural vs. paid listings, one could reasonably argue offline return would be at least as significant as Paid listings described in the study, if not at a greater rate.

image source

What do you think? Could the study be an arrow in the SEO’s pushing-for-more-budget quiver?  Sound off in the comments.

Check out this quick marketing video on the new functionality then read more to understand how this will impact the user and the search marketer.

Here are some of the new functionality that Google Your World brings to the table.  Google has grouped these into three areas (read more at Google’s Inside Search blog.)

1. Personal Results, which enable you to find information just for you, such as Google+ photos and posts—both your own and those shared specifically with you, that only you will be able to see on your results page;
2. Profiles in Search, both in autocomplete and results, which enable you to immediately find people you’re close to or might be interested in following; and,
3. People and Pages, which help you find people profiles and Google+ pages related to a specific topic or area of interest, and enable you to follow them with just a few clicks. Because behind most every query is a community.

image source: Inside Search blog

image source: Inside Search blog

Along with the new functionality, Google is including complete transparency around which results have been influenced by a user’s social profiles.  Google has also included a toggle button to turn on and off personalization at the individual search session and the ability to turn off personalization as default.

How will Google Your World impact the search marketer?

As of now, the majority of searches come from non-personalized results.  Google holds over 60% market share and only a fraction of traffic comes from personalized search. With Google encrypting the referral string of all personalized search queries, it will be difficult for attribution models to identify which keywords are driving traffic to your site.  We are seeing the impact of this being between a lower bound of 2% up to 25% of Google natural search referrals depending on the site.

Measuring the impact of Your World

From a marketing perspective, we still have to focus on the basics of building a great site with a sound infrastructure that is easily crawled by search engines with compelling content that people like to link to, share, and mention.  From a strategic standpoint, this update brings SEO/SEM professionals closer with teams working on social communications.  Social communications are another area that search marketing professionals need direct influence on, as well as partial ownership.  In order to influence the number of personalized results, your site must have compelling, relevant content and the ability for that content to be easily shared.  Many sites offer social buttons on their site and manage their social accounts in order to communicate with people in their niche market. SEO by nature spans across much of the organization from IT, PR, marketing, branding and even HR (think job postings) so it is no surprise that social media is just one more aspect that SEO/SEM professionals must pay attention to.

Today’s announcement by Google is another in a long list of moves over the past year or so towards personalization of search results.  Here’s a list of previous changes on Google’s march towards personalization:

•  October 2010 there is an increased focus on personalizing search query results based on IP location / localization
• January 2011 Larry Page talks about +1 being a tool that will compete in the social media world
• January 2011 Google starts adding more personalization to universal results (starting with news)
• February 2011 Google introduces Social Search, a way of bringing in relevant content from your social connections
• March 2011 Google brought back the ability to hide sites from personalized search
• March 2011 Google rolls out +1
• May 2011 Google Social Search expands globally
• June 2011 the +1 button becomes available for websites
• June 2011 Google starts showing +1 counts in personalized results
• June 2011 Google+ is launched and circles start being created
• June 2011 social metrics are brought into Google Webmaster Tools and Google Analytics
• October 2011 Google makes search more secure by adding encryption to the referral path of logged in users
• November 2011 the Inside Search blog breaks down some of the important aspects of search query personalization

As you think about ‘Google Your World,’ remember that at Conductor we are always here to help you navigate the ever-evolving world of search marketing.

Conductor has been there along the way and have hopefully contributed positively to the discussion.  We’ve also been privileged to host great content from some super smart industry veterans like Ambar Shrivastava (formerly of The Ladders,)  Jeff Herbst from 2tor, and Shelly Towns from Angie’s List. *

*If you are interested in guest-blogging for us in 2012, reach out to Nathan Safran, Senior Research Analyst at Conductor.

Be sure to stay tuned for more great research, information, tips and webinars in 2012. And without further ado, here they are…

The Top 10 Conductor Blog Posts for 2011

1 Internet Retailer 500 Companies with In-House SEO Jumps by 24% in 7 Months

2011 has proven itself to be a year that brands and retailers escalate their focus on SEO. Conductor analysis showed Internet Retailer 500 companies with in-house SEO grew by 24% in seven months.

2 Keys to Success for In-House SEO, Part 1

The former lead in-house SEO for The Ladders, Ambar Shrivastava, answers the question: ‘How do you ensure your SEO team succeeds within a corporate environment?’  Find out how to build a well-rounded SEO team, document best practices, conduct cross-department training and more.

3 Update on Google Encrypted Traffic: 8.875% of Google Traffic (not available)

Google announced that it was now encrypting search results for users. Since a percentage of traffic does not pass search query referral data,  tracking the source of the traffic is more difficult. We analyzed 1.7 million search visits to determine the extent of search traffic that is encrypted.

4 Enterprise SEO: The Yin and Yang of Optimizing Big Websites

There are substantial and unique challenges to optimizing enterprise web sites.  Jeff Gold, Sr. Search Strategist for a Fortune 500 travel site, offers his insight on how best to manage SEO in the enterprise.

5 The Changing Face of the SERPs: 8 out of 10 High Volume Keywords Now Have Universal Results

The legendary “ten blue links” are a thing of the past.  We compare a 2007 SERP to the current search results and examine how Universal results have forever changed the SERPs. You can download the full Universal SERP research report here.

6 Between the Lines of Google’s Search Algorithm Improvements

Every year Google implements over 500 improvements to its search algorithms, and recently released a video describing their internal process for implementing changes to their search engine ranking algorithms.  Conductor SEO expert, Brian McDowell, highlights the most salient points.

7 The SEO Impact of ICANN’s New Top Level Domains

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Name and Numbers’ (ICANN) new Top-Level Domains (gTLD) are coming in 2012.  Conductor’s Rob Rozicki breaks down the SEO impact to websites of all sizes and describes how to plan for the coming change.

8 The Unoptimized SEO Report: How to Save Time in SEO Using Technology

Not all of an SEOs tasks are created equally—each has a varying degree of impact on search visibility.  Conductor’s Unoptimized SEO study examines the impact of  automation technology on the SEO’s ability to spend time on high-impact activities.

9 Personal Brand Management in the Google+ Age of the Search Engines

In June Google launched their new social network, Google +.  With the launch came a new dynamic for social users as their personal brands begin showing prominently in the search results.  Find out what personal brand owners can do to protect their personal brands in the search engines.

10 Thoughts on Where SEO Belongs in the Organization

We often get asked where in the organization search engine optimization (SEO) should sit.  Conductor CEO Seth Besmertnik shares his thoughts and experiences working with organizations and offers the pros and cons for the various options.

Jeff Herbst

I’ve enjoyed the opportunity to put it together this “Rethinking your Keyword Strategy” series for you and I hope you’ve found it to be beneficial so far. In today’s final installment, I’ve outlined several themes and specific examples you should consider when building categories within Searchlight. Back in October, I had the opportunity to speak about this topic at Conductor’s C3 conference. In case you missed part 1 and part 2 of this series, I recommend you review them prior to reading this final post.

There are three category themes every SEO should consider, which are derived from the following areas: Content, Events and Reputation Management.

As I mentioned, there are three keyword category themes I think every SEO should consider, which are derived from the following areas: Content, Events and Reputation Management. In the sections below, I’ll briefly cover a few examples on how these themes can be utilized to create categories that drive business intelligence. Remember these categories certainly aren’t the end-all-be-all. You can always build sub-categories for any of the below themes to be more specific, or identify new categories.

Content

Obviously there is a close connection between a content and keyword strategy. It’s important for your content strategy to group keywords together to understand how different types of keywords are performing in the search engines.

• Branded keywords – Brand descriptors, variations and common misspellings are great to group together and monitor. This also helps you identify other sites ranking for your brand terms.
• Site architecture – Say you are an e-commerce site that has a section for sunglasses. You might decide that it’d be beneficial to group all of your ‘sunglass’ related keywords together to track the performance of that section. I’ve seen SEOs create categories to match their site’s navigation (or at least their top sections within that navigation).
• Keyword context – Grouping similar keywords or keyword phrases that contain a certain word can help you monitor how well you rank for that bucket of keywords. For instance you might decide to create a category called ‘Aviators’ and include keyword phrases that contains the word “aviator” within them.
• Keyword length – If you are interested in tracking your website’s performance for phrases with different keyword counts, it could be in your best interest to create the following categories: Head phrases, Torso phrases and Long Tail phrases.
• Keyword type – Perhaps you have conducted additional research and are able to identify keyword types based upon the searcher’s intent. If so, it would be helpful to group these keywords together within Searchlight and create the following categories: Informational, Navigational and Transactional.
• Geographical – Does your site have a geo-focus? If so, it could be beneficial to segment those keywords into specific regions, states or even cities. A great guide to use for this categorization would be to follow the structure of Google Analytics’ Location report.
• Aspiring keywords – If there are certain keywords that you plan on building into your website (either through new pages, posts or sections) but do not presently have exposure for in the SERPs, then I’d assign them to an ‘aspiring keyword’ category. This way you can track your pre- and post-optimization efforts.
• Seasonal – Most businesses operate in verticals that are affected by seasonality. If you have keywords that are seasonal in nature, it could be beneficial to build a ‘seasonal’ category and sub-categories to track those keywords.

Events

I define an ‘Event’ as any action that leads to a desired conversion from a keyword. Your prioritization exercise provides assistance when building out these ‘Event’ based categories. With Step II, you identified which ‘Events’ mattered most to your business, now you need to set the criteria (define the rules) for how they’ll be categorized. Below are just a few examples – there are probably a hundred variations.

• Priority One Keywords – This category contains the keywords that are considered your ‘best of the best.’ These are the keywords that would keep you up at night (or worse) if your SERP visibility dropped significantly. They are a combination of your top performing keywords from organic, paid and any other area (perhaps they are strategic keywords.)
• Top Keywords from Organic – Keywords within this category would be considered your top producers from organic search. How you define which keywords are your top producers should be based upon your organic KPIs. A few metrics to consider building sub-categories around are: conversion volume, conversion rate, visits and site engagement.
• Top Keywords from Paid – Keywords within this category would be considered your top producers from paid search. How you define which keywords are your top producers should be based upon your paid KPIs. A few metrics to consider building sub-categories around are: CTR, CPC, impressions, overall cost and ROAS.
• Link building – It can be beneficial to create a category that contains all of the keywords you are conducting off-site optimization around. This category allows you to quickly filter to the keywords you are actively investing resources for a status check.

Reputation Management

An additional way to track your brand’s exposure within search engine rankings is through reputation management. Ideally, you can build categories that monitor keyword phrases that are either a positive (neutral) or negative sentiment in nature.

• Positive (neutral) sentiment – This category could contain any keywords that would have a positive or neutral impact on your brand. Perhaps it is an event or cause your company has created or is sponsoring in the future. It could also contain keywords attached to your brand such as ‘review’ or ‘feedback.’
• Negative sentiment – Such a category could contain keywords that carry a negatively impact on the business. Perhaps it is your brand name + ‘scam’ or other negative words attached to your brand.  It could also be a negative piece of press that was released. It is worthwhile to collaborate with your public relations team to identify potential phrases that could appear in SERPs under your brand name.

While taking on such a project can seem to be an incredibly tedious and time – consuming process, rest assured that the benefits it will bring to your team are well worth the effort. Not only will you be able to prioritize your work and identify low-hanging fruit, but you’ll also be able to monitor your strategy more efficiently. All of these tasks enable SEO professionals to make more intelligent business decisions. Plus, what could be a better time of the year to conduct a keyword strategy re-evaluation than the New Year?

As always, we welcome your feedback in the comments below. Happy SEOing to all!

• Beauty
• Clothing
• Electronics
• Jewelry
• Toys

The queries analyzed were high-traffic, purchase-centric terms and represent nearly 1.1 million searches in the US during the month of December. In total, more than 861,030 unique search results from Google, Yahoo and Bing were analyzed.

Big winners include Amazon, Zappos, Overstock, and ebay.  These retailers’ broad product selection, solid site crawlability, and strong backlink profile leave them best positioned in the search engines this holiday season.  Although traditionally brick and mortar retailers, the big box retailers are on strong footing online with Walmart, Target and Macys in seventh, eighth and ninth place respectively.

Download the study to learn more about the winners online this holiday season.

Jeff Herbst

Last week, we published part one of my (originally) two part series on “Rethinking your Keyword Strategy.” In that first post we reviewed the steps required to organize the data needed to execute a keyword strategy re-evaluation. In this post we are going to cover the next two steps, regarding how you can prioritize and categorize your Keyword Scorecard to drive business intelligence. In my final post, I’ll cover several category themes you can build and monitor in Searchlight.

Prioritize Your Scorecard

I am going to preface this step with the following: If you are reading with the hope of receiving concrete instruction – you should probably stop now, as you are setting yourself up for disappointment. Prioritization strategies can vary wildly depending upon the nature of your business. The most important message I will preach is that as an SEO, you should always align keyword strategy with your organic KPIs and goals. This way, there is a clear and direct correlation between the success of your efforts as an SEO and that of your business unit.

…As an SEO, you should always align keyword strategy with your organic KPIs and goals. This way, there is a clear and direct correlation between the success of your efforts as an SEO and that of your business unit.

Below are a few steps you can take which will help you align your keyword strategy and KPIs to simplify the process of prioritizing your Keyword Scorecard. My first suggestion is to answer the following two questions, pertaining specifically to SEO:

• Ultimately, how does my company (department, team, etc) define success?
• If SEO achieved “X,” the company would be impacted for the better.

The first question couldn’t be more straightforward. At the end of the day, how does your company view successful SEO? Is it to improve revenue? To improve brand awareness? To obtain specific search engine rankings? I can’t answer that question for you. What I can say is that it’s crucial for your keyword strategy to reflect how success is measured. That way if anyone ever questions your priorities, they would be questioning a greater business strategy. The second question builds off the first. How can SEO help your business grow? My suggestion is that you use this keyword strategy to achieve big wins that you can easily correlate back to SEO.  This will only further validate SEO and specifically, your team, as a valuable component to the company.

At the end of the day, how does your company view successful SEO? Is it to improve revenue? To improve brand awareness? To obtain specific search engine rankings? I can’t answer that question for you. What I can say is that it’s crucial for your keyword strategy to reflect how success is measured.

Next, I’d have each of your business unit’s stakeholders identify their primary success metrics in a living document that is shared. The goal of this exercise is to understand exactly how success is measured and determined outside of the SEO team. For instance: If you learn that the paid team primarily measures a keyword’s success based upon its return on ad spend (ROAS), then you should understand why this is the case and give weight to those keywords in your prioritization. Once you define the criteria for your prioritization strategy, it’s time to categorize your Keyword Scorecard so that you can properly monitor your progress moving forward.

Categorize Your Scorecard

One of my favorite components of Searchlight is that the platform makes it overly simple to organize your keywords into categories. This makes our lives as SEOs easier, since categories allow us to group keywords based upon our own defined criteria. These categories ultimately help us make more intelligent business decisions and prioritize our work flow.

Personally, I believe the criteria you use to categorize your keywords should be derived from your organic and paid KPIs as well as your content strategy. In my third and final post on this topic, I’ll review three category themes that I recommend you build, but I wanted to highlight some general tips when it comes to category creation before next week:

• Constantly ask yourself, “What benefit will this category provide to me.”
• Build categories into 2 facets: General (the 10,000 ft view) example could be ‘branded terms’ and Detailed (smaller and more specific) an example could ‘top 10 keywords for link building.’
• Don’t hesitate to group keywords into multiple categories.
• Get creative with your categories but always keep the business purpose in mind.

Jeff’s third and final post is coming soon. In the meanwhile, please share your thoughts below. Stay tuned for more!

Over a nine month period we analyzed thousands of keywords in our SEO platform Searchlight^TM, to measure the impact of implementing its on-page recommendations on natural search visibility, and to gauge the difference in movement for long-tail vs. head-term search queries.

Our Findings

Rank Movement: Keywords with on-page optimization activities moved, on average, more than one full page in the search results.

Head vs. Long-Tail: Long-tail (low volume) keywords with on-page optimization moved, on average, more than one full page in the search results.

Conversion Rate: Conversion rates for long-tail terms were 2.5x higher for long-tail queries than for head terms.

Jeff Herbst

Every so often, SEOs should revisit their keyword strategy. This can be a daunting process for many of you, depending upon how large your websites are and how many non-branded (and even branded) keywords there are driving traffic and producing conversions. I am putting together a two-part series to share some of our process and get feedback from other Conductor customers and blog readers on your keyword strategy process.

In this first post, I will cover tips for getting buy-in from management to implement a keyword strategy re-evaluation and how to organize all the keyword data that you will need.

Before You Step: Get Buy-In

Since assessing a website’s keyword strategy can be a time consuming process, it’s important from the beginning that (if applicable to your organization) you get buy-in and support from your manager and/or team by explaining the business case for this activity. Though every organization and business case is different, here are some general points I recommend highlighting:

• Generate more conversions: This activity will identify keyword opportunities that can drive conversions in organic and/or paid search channels.
• Save money: This activity can help identify opportunities where it may be possible to test reducing paid search spend on keywords with an average first or second position whose organic SERP position are also first or second.
• Content opportunities: Identify high-volume keywords that are currently driving clicks and conversions in paid search but do not have visibility in the organic search channels where content can be developed.

If you need help evangelizing SEO within your organization, then you need to get in touch with Conductor’s Stephan Bajaio, as he is an expert in the art of SEO evangelism.

Know and Organize Your Data

The first step in structuring a new keyword strategy is to identify all of your keyword data sources and define a look-back time period. Some of the data sources we look at are Organic, Paid, SERP/Visibility, and Keyword Discovery. The look-back time period is subject to how frequently you evaluate your keyword strategy, but my rule of thumb is to use data from the last three months. Of course this depends on a number of things, including how much data you have. Without using a robust data set, your keyword strategy will suffer so always err on more data than less.

The first step in structuring a new keyword strategy is to identify all of your keyword data sources and define a look-back time period. Some of the data sources we look at are Organic, Paid, SERP/Visibility, and Keyword Discovery.

Once you’ve established your look-back period, it’s time to export the actual data. Before we pull any data, though, we need a place to store this data.  We’ve built out a ‘Keyword Scorecard’ in Excel which is used to house data from each of the sources, independently of one another, in separate tabs. Eventually, we will use this ‘Keyword Scorecard’ to categorize and prioritize our keyword strategy. Disclaimer: The metrics identified below are only examples. I recommend pulling in as much relevant data available into these tabs from the onset to create a holistic view.

We work with our web analyst to pull organic search keyword data from our Analytics provider into the Analytics-Organic tab. Prior to running the export, we make sure to include all of the metrics we have deemed to be crucial (as derived  by our previously established KPIs.)  Again, these metrics will vary depending upon what your business goals are. Next step is to pull in the paid search keyword data.

There are two primary aspects to note with paid search data. First, we work closely with the paid team to include campaigns and keywords which were active throughout the majority (at least 75%) of our look-back time period to control for accuracy. Second, we coordinate with the team to include the metrics which are crucial to their channel’s success. Lastly, we make the conscious decision to only use exact and phrase match data. Using broad search (in my opinion) would only skew our assessment of that keyword’s effectiveness from an organic search perspective, so we ignore it.

At this point in the process, we have three tabs within our Keyword Scorecard: Analytics-Organic, Paid Exact and Paid Phrase. The next step is to bring in data that shows what our current organic visibility is for the keywords we are tracking. At this stage we’ll do an export of Searchlight (into a fourth tab, labelled Searchlight) to pull in our current Google SERP, that keyword’s ranking URL and Google Local (exact) Monthly Search Volume data (so we can have an idea as to how much demand the keyword generates.)

Next we create a fifth tab, called Keyword Discovery. This tab contains keywords we have identified through our own research that we want to further assess and potentially target. We primarily discover these keywords through Searchlight’s Visibility / Traffic Explorer. However, if you aren’t using a solution like Searchlight you could use (or supplement your discovery efforts with) the Google AdWords Keyword Tool. If keyword discovery is a crucial aspect of your team’s responsibility, I recommend investing in an AdWords API Key*,  as it will save you a tremendous amount of time and stress, or a keyword research product. For purposes of the ‘Keyword Scorecard,’ we track and record the same metrics for these keywords as those we captured in the Searchlight tab. *Richard Baxter of SEOGadget, put together a great post about using the AdWords API for SEO.

Bringing It All Together

At this point we have a wealth of data within this Excel workbook, now it’s time to roll that data up into one tab – the ‘Dashboard’ tab.  The Dashboard contains a snapshot of how each keyword performed across sources, during the look-back period. This is the tab we use to categorize and prioritize the keywords based upon their performance and opportunity that exists for them within organic search. First, we visit each tab, copy all keywords and paste them into the Dashboard. Again, this list could be quite substantial depending upon your site’s popularity – don’t let that frighten you, as we can quickly parse this list down. It’s better to have all of the data in one place so that we can confirm no opportunities are missed. Next, we’ll de-duplicate the list to ensure that a list of only unique keywords remains. At this point, we identify the metrics we want to import into the Dashboard from each of the data source tabs and define the columns accordingly. I recommend focusing on the most important metrics (always look to your KPIs) first as others can always be added later. Finally, using several nested ‘Lookup’ formulas, we will pull in corresponding data from each column from each of the respected tabs.

The first draft of your Keyword Scorecard is now complete and ready for your organic team (or even the paid search team) to organize the data set.  I’ll be publishing a follow-up post about how you can categorize and prioritize your Keyword Scorecard within the next week.

Until then, I welcome your feedback and thoughts in the comments below – Are there data sources you use (or would use) which aren’t listed here? Is there another format or methodology you use (or would use) to analyze this data? What is your process for keyword discovery?

Our original look was at 5 high traffic websites – 2 online retailers, 3 service providers – more than 1.7 million visits in total.  We updated the data to include up to Nov 20^th and today, we are giving you a view both averaged week over week and day over day by website.

The percentage of traffic (not provided) grew from less than 1% in the week immediately after the launch, to 8.875% of traffic from Nov. 18-Nov. 20^th (although not a full week.)

Looking at the five websites day over day, the site (site 5) with the most traffic lost to (not provided) peaked at 14% on November 17.  One of the five sites (site 2) lost consistently less traffic than the others, averaging 3.4% in the week between Nov. 14-Nov 20^th, compared to a 10.84% for all other sites in the same time period.

Are you seeing things level off on your site?  Let us know in the comments below.  And, be sure to check out this great post by Avinash Kaushik on how to dive deeper into your (not provided) traffic to better determine the extent and sources of the traffic.