SEO
4 Efficient SEO Frameworks To Manage Clients

Framework 1: Gain Control By Supporting Centralization & Consistency Across Every Brand/Market Mix
You need to have control over all levels:
- Brand level: Plan to highlight all common opportunities across markets to inform central brand strategies and prioritization.
- Market level: Aim to show specific category performance and understand where to maximize performance by minimizing cannibalization between audiences.
- Full central view across brand/market combinations: Coordinate to show macro-level insights that will aid in driving overall client direction and support decision-making on budgeting and prioritization.
These levels need to reflect in reporting, as they are critical to developing any global SEO operational framework.
“In our setup phase, we’ve created monthly dashboards automated with performance data from Google Search Console and SEOmonitor, which get delivered to central clients and local markets as emails with insights. SEOmonitor facilitates free, unlimited API access integration as well as Data Studio connectors for all the critical data of your SEO campaigns. As 80% of our report’s outputs are Data Studio based, this integration was crucial from the start.
These reports include keyword checks across defenses and conquests, highlighting key changes in performance and where additional optimization or review should be considered or actioned.”
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Image by SEOmonitor, November 2022
“You should also think about leveraging automation to scale highly labor-intensive work more effectively.
For keyword segmentation and clustering, we’ve made full use of SEOmonitor’s smart grouping functionality, which allows you to automatically organize keyword lists based on a variety of metric combinations and filters. These smart groups constantly refresh and update based on those filters, so you’re always up to date with targeted changes and insights.”
Framework 2: Maintain SEO Campaign Flexibility So You Cater To Local Market Nuances Where Audiences Behave Differently
It’s true that a standardized approach to SEO helps you act on common issues and opportunities while scaling the bulk of your technical SEO work.
But there is no denying that some markets will show a very different picture from others in terms of current visibility, site content, and brand awareness.
You need to leverage those differences through local search data and intent signals integrated into your content workflow and overall SEO strategy.
“This allows us to centralize SEO actions at scale whilst we tailor outputs to local nuances, market conditions, and available opportunities,” Raluca explains.
With this approach, you get to have a deeper understanding of the opportunity available in all markets in relation to the demand and the competition. Thus, you’ll be able to prioritize markets and focus work at a regional level to ensure that these markets receive the right amount of support while designing the overall strategy toward cumulative growth.
“Delivering an SEO program across so many brands and markets within one client means working with huge sets of search data which need to be managed in the most effective way. That means saving time and ensuring we follow a standardized approach to our work.
SEOmonitor’s keyword grouping system is both flexible and easy to use when setting up campaigns across multi-market clients. Also, with the multilocation feature, the tool allows tracking keywords for different locations within the same client campaign.”
It’s important to have the right technical infrastructure to support that level of complexity.
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Image by SEOmonitor, November 2022
Framework 3: Better Integrate Media Efforts To Adopt A Unified Approach To Global Search
“In the current context where consumers don’t see a distinction between paid and organic search, we are looking to evolve SEO and PPC across all media channels, extending the experience to support ongoing activities and campaigns and drive additional leads and sales,” Raluca highlights.
A One Search, unified framework allows you to assess:
- Which terms you don’t need to bid on because you rank well organically.
- The savings and incremental reach opportunity from paid search.
- The ability to re-invest historically ‘wasted’ PPC budget on longer tail keywords for incremental volume, powered by Search Ads 360.
- Where you can improve the user journey to make traffic more efficient.
Here’s what Raluca and her team did to make the most of the one-search framework:
“Our initial One Search tests relied on pausing PPC spend across keywords with a consistent position 1 visibility and minimal/no PPC competition.
The results have been phenomenal: we have been able to drive 2x improvement in CTR with a minimal increase in CPC. This unified search approach allows us to then further maximize results with better efficiency in terms of resources. Plus, we can become more competitive within the SEO and paid search space leading to an increase in visits and conversions across all sites and demonstrating the value of an integrated approach to search when both channels are managed by the same agency.”
Framework 4: Grow & Benchmark All Target Markets Toward A Common Objective By Developing Search Maturity Roadmaps
Search maturity roadmaps across markets allow you to evaluate:
- How performance differs from one target market to another.
- The current maturity level of each market when it comes to critical aspects of SEO performance such as content, technical, reporting, paid integration, and automation.
That’s where a reliable visibility metric helps you create a realistic benchmark and assess the online “real estate” across markets:
“SEOmonitor’s visibility metric helped us set up a robust measurement framework in place, which has informed the maturity roadmaps. The visibility metric is particularly useful in understanding the client’s website’s current organic visibility across all brands and markets so you can benchmark it against set objectives and KPIs across both mobile and desktop. This, in turn, enables us to develop a deep understanding of the opportunity available in each market. With this in-depth analysis, we can prioritize markets and focus on a regional level with the right amount of effort and resources.”
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Image by SEOmonitor, November 2022
Easily Implement These 4 Global SEO Frameworks With SEOmonitor
When you manage SEO for multi-brand, multi-market clients, it’s critical to design effective frameworks that leverage both your strategic insights and the tech infrastructure at hand:
- You need full visibility at both the market level and across markets (macro level).
- You need to have an in-depth understanding of each market, each audience, and how SEO efforts look overall.
- You must leverage SEO tools and automation, plus create the most impact while being resource-efficient.
- You need to have standardized benchmarks, processes, and practices across the board while keeping differences in check.
As Tudose and her team at Performics have shown, you must design clear objectives and working frameworks from the start, while being flexible enough to account for variations.
There are many things that can go wrong, from cannibalization issues to contrary user patterns, so you must be in control at all times.
We’ve designed SEOmonitor so you can manage SEO campaigns at scale while having fresh data at your disposal — with daily ranks for mobile and desktop as standard. We believe it’s important to have the right level of data granularity so you can make decisions faster.
Plus, with SEOmonitor you own all your campaign data. That’s why you get unlimited access to API, exports, and integrations with Google Sheets and Data Studio.
We know it’s just as important to keep track of all changes, especially with large datasets, and that clients want compelling monthly reports with specific tracked KPIs.
Join us and hundreds of digital marketing agencies in our quest to create more transparency and accountability in the SEO industry. And scale efficiently.
SEO
GPT Store Set To Launch In 2024 After ‘Unexpected’ Delays

OpenAI shares its plans for the GPT Store, enhancements to GPT Builder tools, privacy improvements, and updates coming to ChatGPT.
- OpenAI has scheduled the launch of the GPT Store for early next year, aligning with its ongoing commitment to developing advanced AI technologies.
- The GPT Builder tools have received substantial updates, including a more intuitive configuration interface and improved file handling capabilities.
- Anticipation builds for upcoming updates to ChatGPT, highlighting OpenAI’s responsiveness to community feedback and dedication to AI innovation.
SEO
96.55% of Content Gets No Traffic From Google. Here’s How to Be in the Other 3.45% [New Research for 2023]
![96.55% of Content Gets No Traffic From Google. Here's How to Be in the Other 3.45% [New Research for 2023] 96.55% of Content Gets No Traffic From Google. Here's How to Be in the Other 3.45% [New Research for 2023]](https://articles.entireweb.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/1701464170_9655-of-Content-Gets-No-Traffic-From-Google-Heres-How.jpg)
It’s no secret that the web is growing by millions, if not billions of pages per day.
Our Content Explorer tool discovers 10 million new pages every 24 hours while being very picky about the pages that qualify for inclusion. The “main” Ahrefs web crawler crawls that number of pages every two minutes.
But how much of this content gets organic traffic from Google?
To find out, we took the entire database from our Content Explorer tool (around 14 billion pages) and studied how many pages get traffic from organic search and why.
How many web pages get organic search traffic?
96.55% of all pages in our index get zero traffic from Google, and 1.94% get between one and ten monthly visits.
Before we move on to discussing why the vast majority of pages never get any search traffic from Google (and how to avoid being one of them), it’s important to address two discrepancies with the studied data:
- ~14 billion pages may seem like a huge number, but it’s not the most accurate representation of the entire web. Even compared to the size of Site Explorer’s index of 340.8 billion pages, our sample size for this study is quite small and somewhat biased towards the “quality side of the web.”
- Our search traffic numbers are estimates. Even though our database of ~651 million keywords in Site Explorer (where our estimates come from) is arguably the largest database of its kind, it doesn’t contain every possible thing people search for in Google. There’s a chance that some of these pages get search traffic from super long-tail keywords that are not popular enough to make it into our database.
That said, these two “inaccuracies” don’t change much in the grand scheme of things: the vast majority of published pages never rank in Google and never get any search traffic.
But why is this, and how can you be a part of the minority that gets organic search traffic from Google?
Well, there are hundreds of SEO issues that may prevent your pages from ranking well in Google. But if we focus only on the most common scenarios, assuming the page is indexed, there are only three of them.
Reason 1: The topic has no search demand
If nobody is searching for your topic, you won’t get any search traffic—even if you rank #1.
For example, I recently Googled “pull sitemap into google sheets” and clicked the top-ranking page (which solved my problem in seconds, by the way). But if you plug that URL into Ahrefs’ Site Explorer, you’ll see that it gets zero estimated organic search traffic:
![96.55% of Content Gets No Traffic From Google. Here's How to Be in the Other 3.45% [New Research for 2023] The top-ranking page for this topic gets no traffic because there's no search demand](https://articles.entireweb.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/1701464168_468_9655-of-Content-Gets-No-Traffic-From-Google-Heres-How.png)
![96.55% of Content Gets No Traffic From Google. Here's How to Be in the Other 3.45% [New Research for 2023] The top-ranking page for this topic gets no traffic because there's no search demand](https://articles.entireweb.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/1701464168_468_9655-of-Content-Gets-No-Traffic-From-Google-Heres-How.png)
This is because hardly anyone else is searching for this, as data from Keywords Explorer confirms:
![96.55% of Content Gets No Traffic From Google. Here's How to Be in the Other 3.45% [New Research for 2023] Keyword data from Ahrefs' Keywords Explorer confirms that this topic has no search demand](https://articles.entireweb.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/1701464168_531_9655-of-Content-Gets-No-Traffic-From-Google-Heres-How.png)
![96.55% of Content Gets No Traffic From Google. Here's How to Be in the Other 3.45% [New Research for 2023] Keyword data from Ahrefs' Keywords Explorer confirms that this topic has no search demand](https://articles.entireweb.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/1701464168_531_9655-of-Content-Gets-No-Traffic-From-Google-Heres-How.png)
This is why it’s so important to do keyword research. You can’t just assume that people are searching for whatever you want to talk about. You need to check the data.
Our Traffic Potential (TP) metric in Keywords Explorer can help with this. It estimates how much organic search traffic the current top-ranking page for a keyword gets from all the queries it ranks for. This is a good indicator of the total search demand for a topic.
You’ll see this metric for every keyword in Keywords Explorer, and you can even filter for keywords that meet your minimum criteria (e.g., 500+ monthly traffic potential):
![96.55% of Content Gets No Traffic From Google. Here's How to Be in the Other 3.45% [New Research for 2023] Filtering for keywords with Traffic Potential (TP) in Ahrefs' Keywords Explorer](https://articles.entireweb.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/1701464168_670_9655-of-Content-Gets-No-Traffic-From-Google-Heres-How.png)
![96.55% of Content Gets No Traffic From Google. Here's How to Be in the Other 3.45% [New Research for 2023] Filtering for keywords with Traffic Potential (TP) in Ahrefs' Keywords Explorer](https://articles.entireweb.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/1701464168_670_9655-of-Content-Gets-No-Traffic-From-Google-Heres-How.png)
Reason 2: The page has no backlinks
Backlinks are one of Google’s top three ranking factors, so it probably comes as no surprise that there’s a clear correlation between the number of websites linking to a page and its traffic.
![96.55% of Content Gets No Traffic From Google. Here's How to Be in the Other 3.45% [New Research for 2023] Pages with more referring domains get more traffic](https://articles.entireweb.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/1701464168_94_9655-of-Content-Gets-No-Traffic-From-Google-Heres-How.png)
![96.55% of Content Gets No Traffic From Google. Here's How to Be in the Other 3.45% [New Research for 2023] Pages with more referring domains get more traffic](https://articles.entireweb.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/1701464168_94_9655-of-Content-Gets-No-Traffic-From-Google-Heres-How.png)
Same goes for the correlation between a page’s traffic and keyword rankings:
![96.55% of Content Gets No Traffic From Google. Here's How to Be in the Other 3.45% [New Research for 2023] Pages with more referring domains rank for more keywords](https://articles.entireweb.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/1701464168_324_9655-of-Content-Gets-No-Traffic-From-Google-Heres-How.png)
![96.55% of Content Gets No Traffic From Google. Here's How to Be in the Other 3.45% [New Research for 2023] Pages with more referring domains rank for more keywords](https://articles.entireweb.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/1701464168_324_9655-of-Content-Gets-No-Traffic-From-Google-Heres-How.png)
Does any of this data prove that backlinks help you rank higher in Google?
No, because correlation does not imply causation. However, most SEO professionals will tell you that it’s almost impossible to rank on the first page for competitive keywords without backlinks—an observation that aligns with the data above.
The key word there is “competitive.” Plenty of pages get organic traffic while having no backlinks…
![96.55% of Content Gets No Traffic From Google. Here's How to Be in the Other 3.45% [New Research for 2023] Pages with more referring domains get more traffic](https://articles.entireweb.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/1701464168_573_9655-of-Content-Gets-No-Traffic-From-Google-Heres-How.png)
![96.55% of Content Gets No Traffic From Google. Here's How to Be in the Other 3.45% [New Research for 2023] Pages with more referring domains get more traffic](https://articles.entireweb.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/1701464168_573_9655-of-Content-Gets-No-Traffic-From-Google-Heres-How.png)
… but from what I can tell, almost all of them are about low-competition topics.
For example, this lyrics page for a Neil Young song gets an estimated 162 monthly visits with no backlinks:
![96.55% of Content Gets No Traffic From Google. Here's How to Be in the Other 3.45% [New Research for 2023] Example of a page with traffic but no backlinks, via Ahrefs' Content Explorer](https://articles.entireweb.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/1701464168_883_9655-of-Content-Gets-No-Traffic-From-Google-Heres-How.png)
![96.55% of Content Gets No Traffic From Google. Here's How to Be in the Other 3.45% [New Research for 2023] Example of a page with traffic but no backlinks, via Ahrefs' Content Explorer](https://articles.entireweb.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/1701464168_883_9655-of-Content-Gets-No-Traffic-From-Google-Heres-How.png)
But if we check the keywords it ranks for, they almost all have Keyword Difficulty (KD) scores in the single figures:
![96.55% of Content Gets No Traffic From Google. Here's How to Be in the Other 3.45% [New Research for 2023] Some of the low-difficulty keywords a page without traffic ranks for](https://articles.entireweb.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/1701464168_388_9655-of-Content-Gets-No-Traffic-From-Google-Heres-How.png)
![96.55% of Content Gets No Traffic From Google. Here's How to Be in the Other 3.45% [New Research for 2023] Some of the low-difficulty keywords a page without traffic ranks for](https://articles.entireweb.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/1701464168_388_9655-of-Content-Gets-No-Traffic-From-Google-Heres-How.png)
It’s the same story for this page selling upholstered headboards:
![96.55% of Content Gets No Traffic From Google. Here's How to Be in the Other 3.45% [New Research for 2023] Some of the low-difficulty keywords a page without traffic ranks for](https://articles.entireweb.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/1701464168_125_9655-of-Content-Gets-No-Traffic-From-Google-Heres-How.png)
![96.55% of Content Gets No Traffic From Google. Here's How to Be in the Other 3.45% [New Research for 2023] Some of the low-difficulty keywords a page without traffic ranks for](https://articles.entireweb.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/1701464168_125_9655-of-Content-Gets-No-Traffic-From-Google-Heres-How.png)
You might have noticed two other things about these pages:
- Neither of them get that much traffic. This is pretty typical. Our index contains ~20 million pages with no referring domains, yet only 2,997 of them get more than 1K search visits per month. That’s roughly 1 in every 6,671 pages with no backlinks.
- Both of the sites they’re on have high Domain Rating (DR) scores. This metric shows the relative strength of a website’s backlink profile. Stronger sites like these have more PageRank that they can pass to pages with internal links to help them rank.
Bottom line? If you want your pages to get search traffic, you really only have two options:
- Target uncompetitive topics that you can rank for with few or no backlinks.
- Target competitive topics and build backlinks to rank.
If you want to find uncompetitive topics, try this:
- Enter a topic into Keywords Explorer
- Go to the Matching terms report
- Set the Keyword Difficulty (KD) filter to max. 20
- Set the Lowest DR filter to your site’s DR (this will show you keywords with at least one of the same or lower DR ranking in the top 5)
![96.55% of Content Gets No Traffic From Google. Here's How to Be in the Other 3.45% [New Research for 2023] Filtering for low-competition keywords in Ahrefs' Keywords Explorer](https://articles.entireweb.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/1701464169_37_9655-of-Content-Gets-No-Traffic-From-Google-Heres-How.png)
![96.55% of Content Gets No Traffic From Google. Here's How to Be in the Other 3.45% [New Research for 2023] Filtering for low-competition keywords in Ahrefs' Keywords Explorer](https://articles.entireweb.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/1701464169_37_9655-of-Content-Gets-No-Traffic-From-Google-Heres-How.png)
(Remember to keep an eye on the TP column to make sure they have traffic potential.)
To rank for more competitive topics, you’ll need to earn or build high-quality backlinks to your page. If you’re not sure how to do that, start with the guides below. Keep in mind that it’ll be practically impossible to get links unless your content adds something to the conversation.
Reason 3. The page doesn’t match search intent
Google wants to give users the most relevant results for a query. That’s why the top organic results for “best yoga mat” are blog posts with recommendations, not product pages.
![96.55% of Content Gets No Traffic From Google. Here's How to Be in the Other 3.45% [New Research for 2023] It's obviously what searchers want when they search for "best yoga mats"](https://articles.entireweb.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/9655-of-Content-Gets-No-Traffic-From-Google-Heres-How.jpg)
![96.55% of Content Gets No Traffic From Google. Here's How to Be in the Other 3.45% [New Research for 2023] It's obviously what searchers want when they search for "best yoga mats"](https://articles.entireweb.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/9655-of-Content-Gets-No-Traffic-From-Google-Heres-How.jpg)
Basically, Google knows that searchers are in research mode, not buying mode.
It’s also why this page selling yoga mats doesn’t show up, despite it having backlinks from more than six times more websites than any of the top-ranking pages:
![96.55% of Content Gets No Traffic From Google. Here's How to Be in the Other 3.45% [New Research for 2023] Page selling yoga mats that has lots of backlinks](https://articles.entireweb.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/1701464169_945_9655-of-Content-Gets-No-Traffic-From-Google-Heres-How.png)
![96.55% of Content Gets No Traffic From Google. Here's How to Be in the Other 3.45% [New Research for 2023] Page selling yoga mats that has lots of backlinks](https://articles.entireweb.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/1701464169_945_9655-of-Content-Gets-No-Traffic-From-Google-Heres-How.png)
![96.55% of Content Gets No Traffic From Google. Here's How to Be in the Other 3.45% [New Research for 2023] Number of linking websites to the top-ranking pages for "best yoga mats"](https://articles.entireweb.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/1701464169_703_9655-of-Content-Gets-No-Traffic-From-Google-Heres-How.png)
![96.55% of Content Gets No Traffic From Google. Here's How to Be in the Other 3.45% [New Research for 2023] Number of linking websites to the top-ranking pages for "best yoga mats"](https://articles.entireweb.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/1701464169_703_9655-of-Content-Gets-No-Traffic-From-Google-Heres-How.png)
Luckily, the page ranks for thousands of other more relevant keywords and gets tens of thousands of monthly organic visits. So it’s not such a big deal that it doesn’t rank for “best yoga mats.”
![96.55% of Content Gets No Traffic From Google. Here's How to Be in the Other 3.45% [New Research for 2023] Number of keyword rankings for the page selling yoga mats](https://articles.entireweb.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/1701464169_1_9655-of-Content-Gets-No-Traffic-From-Google-Heres-How.png)
![96.55% of Content Gets No Traffic From Google. Here's How to Be in the Other 3.45% [New Research for 2023] Number of keyword rankings for the page selling yoga mats](https://articles.entireweb.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/1701464169_1_9655-of-Content-Gets-No-Traffic-From-Google-Heres-How.png)
However, if you have pages with lots of backlinks but no organic traffic—and they already target a keyword with traffic potential—another quick SEO win is to re-optimize them for search intent.
We did this in 2018 with our free backlink checker.
It was originally nothing but a boring landing page explaining the benefits of our product and offering a 7-day trial:
![96.55% of Content Gets No Traffic From Google. Here's How to Be in the Other 3.45% [New Research for 2023] Original landing page for our free backlink checker](https://articles.entireweb.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/1701464169_536_9655-of-Content-Gets-No-Traffic-From-Google-Heres-How.jpg)
![96.55% of Content Gets No Traffic From Google. Here's How to Be in the Other 3.45% [New Research for 2023] Original landing page for our free backlink checker](https://articles.entireweb.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/1701464169_536_9655-of-Content-Gets-No-Traffic-From-Google-Heres-How.jpg)
After analyzing search intent, we soon realized the issue:
People weren’t looking for a landing page, but rather a free tool they could use right away.
So, in September 2018, we created a free tool and published it under the same URL. It ranked #1 pretty much overnight, and has remained there ever since.
![96.55% of Content Gets No Traffic From Google. Here's How to Be in the Other 3.45% [New Research for 2023] Our rankings over time for the keyword "backlink checker." You can see when we changed the page](https://articles.entireweb.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/1701464169_302_9655-of-Content-Gets-No-Traffic-From-Google-Heres-How.png)
![96.55% of Content Gets No Traffic From Google. Here's How to Be in the Other 3.45% [New Research for 2023] Our rankings over time for the keyword "backlink checker." You can see when we changed the page](https://articles.entireweb.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/1701464169_302_9655-of-Content-Gets-No-Traffic-From-Google-Heres-How.png)
Organic traffic went through the roof, too. From ~14K monthly organic visits pre-optimization to almost ~200K today.
![96.55% of Content Gets No Traffic From Google. Here's How to Be in the Other 3.45% [New Research for 2023] Estimated search traffic over time to our free backlink checker](https://articles.entireweb.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/1701464169_112_9655-of-Content-Gets-No-Traffic-From-Google-Heres-How.png)
![96.55% of Content Gets No Traffic From Google. Here's How to Be in the Other 3.45% [New Research for 2023] Estimated search traffic over time to our free backlink checker](https://articles.entireweb.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/1701464169_112_9655-of-Content-Gets-No-Traffic-From-Google-Heres-How.png)
TLDR
96.55% of pages get no organic traffic.
Keep your pages in the other 3.45% by building backlinks, choosing topics with organic traffic potential, and matching search intent.
Ping me on Twitter if you have any questions. 🙂
SEO
Firefox URL Tracking Removal – Is This A Trend To Watch?

Firefox recently announced that they are offering users a choice on whether or not to include tracking information from copied URLs, which comes on the on the heels of iOS 17 blocking user tracking via URLs. The momentum of removing tracking information from URLs appears to be gaining speed. Where is this all going and should marketers be concerned?
Is it possible that blocking URL tracking parameters in the name of privacy will become a trend industrywide?
Firefox Announcement
Firefox recently announced that beginning in the Firefox Browser version 120.0, users will be able to select whether or not they want URLs that they copied to contain tracking parameters.
When users select a link to copy and click to raise the contextual menu for it, Firefox is now giving users a choice as to whether to copy the URL with or without the URL tracking parameters that might be attached to the URL.
Screenshot Of Firefox 120 Contextual Menu
According to the Firefox 120 announcement:
“Firefox supports a new “Copy Link Without Site Tracking” feature in the context menu which ensures that copied links no longer contain tracking information.”
Browser Trends For Privacy
All browsers, including Google’s Chrome and Chrome variants, are adding new features that make it harder for websites to track users online through referrer information embedded in a URL when a user clicks from one site and leaves through that click to visit another site.
This trend for privacy has been ongoing for many years but it became more noticeable in 2020 when Chrome made changes to how referrer information was sent when users click links to visit other sites. Firefox and Safari followed with similar referrer behavior.
Whether the current Firefox implementation would be disruptive or if the impact is overblown is kind of besides the point.
What is the point is whether or not what Firefox and Apple did to protect privacy is a trend and if that trend will extend to more blocking of URL parameters that are stronger than what Firefox recently implemented.
I asked Kenny Hyder, CEO of online marketing agency Pixel Main, what his thoughts are about the potential disruptive aspect of what Firefox is doing and whether it’s a trend.
Kenny answered:
“It’s not disruptive from Firefox alone, which only has a 3% market share. If other popular browsers follow suit it could begin to be disruptive to a limited degree, but easily solved from a marketers prospective.
If it became more intrusive and they blocked UTM tags, it would take awhile for them all to catch on if you were to circumvent UTM tags by simply tagging things in a series of sub-directories.. ie. site.com/landing/<tag1>/<tag2> etc.
Also, most savvy marketers are already integrating future proof workarounds for these exact scenarios.
A lot can be done with pixel based integrations rather than cookie based or UTM tracking. When set up properly they can actually provide better and more accurate tracking and attribution. Hence the name of my agency, Pixel Main.”
I think most marketers are aware that privacy is the trend. The good ones have already taken steps to keep it from becoming a problem while still respecting user privacy.”
Some URL Parameters Are Already Affected
For those who are on the periphery of what’s going on with browsers and privacy, it may come as a surprise that some tracking parameters are already affected by actions meant to protect user privacy.
Jonathan Cairo, Lead Solutions Engineer at Elevar shared that there is already a limited amount of tracking related information stripped from URLs.
But he also explained that there are limits to how much information can be stripped from URLs because the resulting negative effects would cause important web browsing functionality to fail.
Jonathan explained:
“So far, we’re seeing a selective trend where some URL parameters, like ‘fbclid’ in Safari’s private browsing, are disappearing, while others, such as TikTok’s ‘ttclid’, remain.
UTM parameters are expected to stay since they focus on user segmentation rather than individual tracking, provided they are used as intended.
The idea of completely removing all URL parameters seems improbable, as it would disrupt key functionalities on numerous websites, including banking services and search capabilities.
Such a drastic move could lead users to switch to alternative browsers.
On the other hand, if only some parameters are eliminated, there’s the possibility of marketers exploiting the remaining ones for tracking purposes.
This raises the question of whether companies like Apple will take it upon themselves to prevent such use.
Regardless, even in a scenario where all parameters are lost, there are still alternative ways to convey click IDs and UTM information to websites.”
Brad Redding of Elevar agreed about the disruptive effect from going too far with removing URL tracking information:
“There is still too much basic internet functionality that relies on query parameters, such as logging in, password resets, etc, which are effectively the same as URL parameters in a full URL path.
So we believe the privacy crackdown is going to continue on known trackers by blocking their tracking scripts, cookies generated from them, and their ability to monitor user’s activity through the browser.
As this grows, the reliance on brands to own their first party data collection and bring consent preferences down to a user-level (vs session based) will be critical so they can backfill gaps in conversion data to their advertising partners outside of the browser or device.”
The Future Of Tracking, Privacy And What Marketers Should Expect
Elevar raises good points about how far browsers can go in terms of how much blocking they can do. Their response that it’s down to brands to own their first party data collection and other strategies to accomplish analytics without compromising user privacy.
Given all the laws governing privacy and Internet tracking that have been enacted around the world it looks like privacy will continue to be a trend.
However, at this point it time, the advice is to keep monitoring how far browsers are going but there is no expectation that things will get out of hand.
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