Why do WMT's Search Analytics & GA's Real Time Keywords Differ?

[GilReich]

I took a screen shot of the keywords from Google Analytics Real Time Keywords for Google / Organic. Then I waited a week and filtered Google Webmaster Tools' Search Analytics for queries with those keywords. None of them showed up.

1. Why not? What I missing?
2. Why do some keywords show up in Google Analytics RT for Google / Organic while most others are in Not Provided?
3. I see WMT's Search Analytics says that it doesn't always show queries that "are made a very small number of times or those that contain personal or sensitive information." But most of my queries are like that. Anybody know any patterns / criteria that leads WMT to show some but not others?

Thanks

[troy.evans]

Hi Gil,

Unfortunately I do not have a direct answer as to what is causing your particular discrepancy between GA and GWT's Search Console. However, I think this article might be helpful in trying to understand why you're seeing the results you've described.

http://www.lunametrics.com/blog/2015/08/05/google-search-console-clicks-vs-google-analytics-sessions/

Basically, these systems use very different calculations to return the data they provide. To be honest, when it comes to the Real Time results in GA I would be quite surprised to find any of them in the Search Console or a regular GA report unless it is a head term that frequently drives a significant amount of traffic...

I am curious as to whether or not you have seen the Real Time results match up in the past. Please do post an update if these reports end up matching in the future!

[GilReich]

Thanks. They are very long tail terms, everything on this site is. Yes, the GA & GWT top 1,000 queries match. But neither matches the Real Time results from that day's Analytics (even after waiting a few days for the regular analytics keyword reports to include the RT data from a few days earlier).

[Martijn_Scheijbeler]

1. Hard to answer without more data for now, it could be that they were very long tail terms. How about doing a reverse one on this and checking the most popular keywords in Google Search Console versus Google Analytics.
2. It can be that certain people are using a Google service that is not connected to HTTPS, in these cases you should still be able to see the keywords. But currently that's less than 10% of all organic users.

[DmitriiK]

Hi there.

I'll try to help as much as I can, but this new GMT/GA policies are very confusing to me.

So, to start, as far as I know, Google stopped providing organic search keywords recently due to security reasons etc. I can't find any recent articles about this, so may be other MOZers can leave a link. That's why there is so much of (not provided) keywords.

Also, as far as I understand, GMT provides much accurate (and actually more than GA) data. So, I'd trust GMT rather that GA. I know that you can connect them and all, but from my experience, GMT shows more.

I know it doesn't really answer your questions, but i hope it can at least lead you in direction you can dig more.