Tuesday Tip:"Not Provided" in Google Analytics- 1

Tuesday Tip: Not Provided in Google Analytics- 1

What does "Not Provided" mean?

In October 2011 Google made the following announcement-

"When you search from https://www.google.com, websites you visit from our organic search listings will still know that you came from Google, but won't receive information about each individual query"

This means that users logged into their Google accounts using www.google.com for search would be redirected to https://www.google.com. The search queries by these users are therefore encrypted and not available to website owners in web analytics tools like Google Analytics.

Note that Adwords traffic is not effected by this. Therefore, even if the user is logged into their Google Account while clicking your PPC ad, the data will be provided to the advertiser.

How to get some clarification on the Data

The first step is to figure out how much of your traffic is from branded keywords vs non branded keywords through examining historic data. What are branded keywords? According to seomoz

"Keywords related to your brand tend to show up at the end of the conversion funnel, when visitors are already aware and interested. They’re more specific and unique, often based on company and domain names, key products, and variations/misspellings of those names and products. They aren’t subject to the fluctuations caused by search algorithms in the same way that non-branded keywords are. This makes them useful as indicators of long-term strength and popularity. For that reason, most sites should see a decent portion of traffic coming from brand-related keywords."

Go to custom date range on your Google Analytics Dashboard and choose the length of the time you want to examine. Let us take Boston Logic as an example (Note that this change was announced in Oct, 2011, therefore if you are using data from 2011 choose the custom date range Jan 2011-Oct 2011).
You can get this data by going to Organic under Search on your Traffic Sources on your Google Dashboard and using advanced filter to separate words related to your company.

Boston Logic has 7620 Organic visits with 3240 visits coming from keywords containing Boston Logic. Therefore the percentage of organic traffic from branded keywords is about 57% ( Organic visits - Visits via Branded Keywords/ Organic Traffic * 100)

There are few more steps involved in how we leverage this data to throw some light on "not provided" in Google Analytics which will be covered next week in part 2 of this Tip.

In the Meantime if you want to know more about SEO & PPC services provided by Boston Logic contact us now!

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