Google Analytics - Not provided info

[iivgi]

Morning all,

i am using Google analytics for some time now,

One of the issues that i don't have a clear answer for is, when i am looking at Traffic Source --> overview

In the Keyword column, that is a line (not provided)

What we think here is that we cant see the keywords if someone arrived to our website but was logged-in to Google account

Is this correct?

is there a way to find the keywords behind this (not provided)? - i have many visits for this line (17.3% of all visits) and i don't know which keywords people used.

Thank you

SeoWise

[josh-riley]

Slightly contrary: at SMX last year, there was a panel on this topic and the main takeaway was even after 300+ man hours from one agency who looked at different ways to back into this data, you aren't going to get much success at uncovering it.

I totally understand the attraction for wanting to try to dig, I'm not suggesting otherwise, just pointing out that there's an overall limitation to what you may end up with and comparing that to the time and effort required to unravel it.

[WorldText]

Whilst you can't get at the actual keywords behind "not provided", you can do a lot to mitigate the black hole using rank tracking.

You can add an Analytics event to track rank, which also shows average rank on not provided, per landing page.  This doesn't give actual keywords, but you're now in a place where you can infer a lot.  Assuming you have enough site traffic for it to be meaningful, you can now infer likely keywords based on what keywords bring traffic to those pages when you do have the data.

For example clicking into top events, you can now see a list of landing pages behind (not provided).  Each page is shown, along with the number of events triggered (meaning visitors), and average value (meaning search rank on whatever hidden keywords were used).

Of course you have no way of knowing when someone used a unique long-tail search, or if for whatever reason the spread of keywords in "not provided" is actually different to visible keywords.

But it is enough to be useful, and vastly better than having no info at all on 20%+ of your traffic.  Or in our case 40%+

To set up event based rank tracking, see this post from AJ Kohn : http://www.blindfiveyearold.com/new-ways-to-track-keyword-rank

The info you need is about half way down that post.

[LynnPatchett]

Hi,

You are exactly right, not provided is shown for users entering the site through organic searches when they are logged into a google account at the same time. 17% is not too bad, I have some sites where it is above 50%!

There are a couple of ways to approach this. The most common is to remove the not provided data from your searches and then look at the percentages of your main keywords/phrases in what remains. All things being equal, your not provided data will likely contain roughly the same percentages of these keywords also.

You can also look at your cpc data if you have it, since google has decided to show all matched queries for paid data. This can be another source of information in regards percentages of keywords used to land on the site which can then be applied to your not provided numbers.

Hope that helps!