As you may have heard already via AJ Ghergich or my post referencing his on Search Engine Land – it seems incredibly likely that the changes coming to not provided via Google is that they will apply the same rule they have for organic referrer data to AdWords referrer data.

I spoke to the sources of this “rumor” directly as well and I am trusting the source for a lot of reasons.

In short, it seems Google will be announcing very soon that not only will organic search results not pass referrer keyword data but also AdWords ads. Why? Well (1) there as a lot of hypocrisy around just stripping keyword data for organic and not ads and (2) this makes the whole logic behind stripping the data more (not fully) logical.

It seems that your analytics packages will also show [not provided] for your AdWords ads in the near future.

Google would not confirm these reports with me or anyone else.

What about auto-tagging and exact match and stuff like that? I have no clue. Since Google won’t confirm it, I have no one to ask how that may or may not work. I guess we wait for the official announcement so we can dig into how this will be implemented and exactly how this will impact advertisers.

I am sure, just like Webmaster Tools shows the data, so will AdWords reports. But still, the analytics reports will most likely not have that data.

Forum discussion at Google+.

Update: The rumors were indeed true, read more about it over here.