Google removes keyword data from Analytics
(not provided) Has been thwarting companies for the past year when trying to determine which keywords bring search traffic to their website.
We now find ourselves in a situation where Google has encrypted all of its organic search data, resulting in (not provided) accounting for over 75% of search data.
What does (not provided) mean?
A user may have used any search term in your target list, or a different phrase altogether, but because of Google’s updated privacy policy they will no longer share this information.
Searches coming from users logged into Google’s services (Gmail, Google+ and more) means they are browsing from a secure version of the search engine – with a “https” prefix instead of the standard “http”.
What Google says?
What Google has to say about the update:
“What does this mean for sites that receive clicks from Google search results? 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. They can also receive an aggregated list of the top 1,000 search queries that drove traffic to their site for each of the past 30 days through Google Webmaster Tools. This information helps webmasters keep more accurate statistics about their user traffic. If you choose to click on an ad appearing on our search results page, your browser will continue to send the relevant query over the network to enable advertisers to measure the effectiveness of their campaigns and to improve the ads and offers they present to you.”
You can read the full blog post from Google here.