Comments on: Google Analytics (not provided) Keyword – Thanks for the Ambiguity

By: Top Five Awards

Top Five Awards — Mon, 01 Jul 2013 20:08:00 +0000

Very nice man. Great advice.

By: Paul Alden

Paul Alden — Fri, 28 Jun 2013 21:42:00 +0000

good stuff!

By: Randall Newnham

Randall Newnham — Fri, 28 Jun 2013 21:22:00 +0000

Thank you! I’m always trying to figure out how to best use Google Analytics. This helps!

By: KG Books

KG Books — Fri, 28 Jun 2013 21:14:00 +0000

Great informational post. Didn’t realize that about keyword searching.

By: transcendev

transcendev — Thu, 27 Jun 2013 04:34:00 +0000

Not surprising. But I’ll bet Google has that info readily available for the government!

By: terilg

terilg — Thu, 27 Jun 2013 04:02:00 +0000

Check back over the coming weeks…. D day keeps getting closer and closer…. courtesy of the increasing ways your search can be treated as secure.

By: transcendev

transcendev — Thu, 27 Jun 2013 03:32:00 +0000

Well holy crap, we’ve only got 3 more years to enjoy having ANY clue about the actual keywords people use to find us.

By: terilg

terilg — Thu, 27 Jun 2013 03:25:00 +0000

Great post. Here’s a fun little site where they’re estimating on what day ALL organic searches will come in as (not provided) based on current trending data. http://www.notprovidedcount.com/

By: transcendev

transcendev — Thu, 27 Jun 2013 02:12:00 +0000

Brad I manage a lot of non-seo/web development sites and I see nearly as many (not provided) results in their analytics as well. Like you, on any given day, somewhere around 90% of my own sites keywords are lost to this issue. It’s really ridiculous and degrades the usefulness of the keyword reports. With the prevalence of folks using Gmail for their regular email, this issue is well beyond the small percentage Google suggested it would be and I’ve got to imagine it’s going to continue to get worse and worse as Android continues to become the dominant mobile platform…which of course can only be fully enjoyed with a Google account. The of course would render most mobile search queries as (not provided).

The thing I find the most amusing is that the suggested solution I see many bouncing around is to use Adwords. Gah!? Adwords? Don’t even get me started on Adwords! :^)

By: Brad Knutson

Brad Knutson — Thu, 27 Jun 2013 01:58:00 +0000

This is something I’ve struggled with. It’s difficult, especially for marketing departments, to quantify the lost data. When Google first rolled out the (not provided) keyword, I read somewhere that it was only supposed to affect a small percentage of search traffic. Well…in my niche (seo/web development) nearly everyone has a Google account of some kind, and I lose about 85-90% of my keyword data.

I decided to take a similar approach to the one you wrote about above. The exact data is lost and can’t be recovered, but we can infer a lot based on the landing page. I’ve actually chosen to rewrite all (not provided) keywords in Google Analytics to the “np-{path/to/landing/page}” format – this way I can quickly see what landing page the search traffic went to on my Organic Search report, and make a educated guess as to what keyword they used.

Thanks for posting this!