So Google Analytics Is Saying Some Keywords Are "Not Provided". Here's Why.
For the past five years Google has continued to spoil its loyal users of their Analytics offering by providing us more and more enterprise level services. The most recent offering being a real time analytics beta that gives you live feedback of the activity taking place on your site. Just recently, however, Google has been drawing the ire of users for something you'll find in your keyword report, the dreaded "not provided" response.
So what exactly does "not provided" mean in your analytics report? Well, sadly, it means that Google is not going to tell you what the keywords are for logged in users. Google claims this is a move towards more security by making SSL encryption the default (previously, you could achieve the same measure of security by using httpS://google.com), but as many search marketers and analytics junkies (like Ian Lurie) have pointed out, this reeks of a power play by Google. Anyhow, what is actually happening? Let me explain.
At the most basic level, Google is no longer passing information to analytics for organic results when users are logged into Google. So, if someone's regularly signed into gmail or Google+ and doing their browsing, their data is "protected" and will not be passed along in the form of the referral string used to feed Google Analytics. The users overall behavior is still in place, and you'll know they came from Google organic search, but you'll have no idea if they searched for animal crackers or brush fires. Not very helpful for anyone who uses this intelligence to focus their SEO efforts or tries to optimize landing pages based around organic keywords.
There definitely seems to be some validity to the groaning going on in the online marketing community, especially since Google's sudden need to protect your privacy doesn't stop them from displaying contextual ads in your gmail based on the text in your emails and still passes the keyword information along when users click on Adwords Ads. Seems awfully convenient to take away data for part of the product that Google doesn't make any money on, doesn't it?
In the meantime, you're probably wondering how much data is being affected by this. From what I have seen from others and from what I've seen myself, it seems to top out at a2-3% of organic search and falls down to almost not statistically significant numbers in other markets. Analytics SEO did a nice post on their findings that show about 2.82% of traffic they've monitored has shown up as not provided.
So while this may only be affecting a small portion of your organic traffic for the time being, as the scope of Google properties that require logins grow, this could indeed become a problem for data hungry online marketers.
Related articles
- Google Hides Search Referral Data with New SSL Implementation - Emergency Whiteboard Friday (seomoz.org)
- Google to Implement SSL Encryption to Searches (bruceclay.com.au)
What’s weird to me is that my ”not provided” keyword also seems to take off around October 17 as well (Just like in your snapshot) Maybe analytics shows us all of the Keywords after all, and they just want us to think we are not getting all of the data in order to start charging us to see it.
Just a thought.
An interesting thought Brian, but unlikely. With access to as much data as we have, it’s quite clear that not provided is simply eating some of our search data. Some people had been using the https://google.com previously, but it was a miniscule amount that did show up as “not provided”, but when you look at sites that get millions of visits a month, it becomes all too clear just how big of a problem this may become for webmasters and search marketers.