‘Not Set’ in Google Analytics: Tuesday Tip : Boston Logic

‘Not Set’ in Google Analytics: Tuesday Tip

Recently, we have been getting a lot of questions about why Google analytics does not show certain data and what does it mean. The two main things that come up during conversation is "NOT SET" .

Today we will take on "Not Set" and find out what it means.

DEFINITION

"Any direct visit or referral visit will be shown under "not set" because it does not have a keyword, ad content, or any other campaign information associated with the visit. The explanations below can help you figure out why a campaign attribute wasn't collected along with the visit."

In other words- not set means that the user came to your site through direct traffic which could mean any of the following-

1. Typing in the URL in the browser.

2. From browser bookmarks or through a referral site.

3. From links in email footers or newsletters without campaign identifications.

4. From links in office documents like Word, Excel, Powerpoint, or PDF documents.

However, If you see a high percentage of NOT SET in your Google analytics paid traffic report follow the following steps to narrow down the problem-

1. Click on Traffic sources, under sources click on the paid tab . When you click 'not set' keyword in the secondary dimension menu, select traffic Source, then select Landing Page (see screenshot below). These would help you narrow down the keyword.

2. Once you know the keyword you can use URL BUILDER to tag your destination URLs so that they're set to the specific campaign variables (source, medium) and they help you understand your paid traffic better.

Next week we will try to tackle another problem called "not provided" which has been showing up in Google Analytics recently.

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