Can assumptions be made for (not provided)?

[WhiteboardCreations]

With the (not provided) numbers growing to the inevitable 100%, can we make any assumptions about what the (not provided) visits includes without sifting through 5 software programs, Moz analytics, Google Analytics, Webmasters Tool, etc?

It seems like a TON of time and work to "try" and get (not provided) data/keywords from all the articles and heads of the industries I've been reading. That amount of time and work are just not viable for a smaller SEO or single SEO working with smaller budgets, so my question, can we make an estimated guess based on visits for local businesses that most are branded keywords bringing traffic? Or am I way off here?

Thanks in advance for sharing your thoughts or how you handle (not provided) with your clients.

[WhiteboardCreations]

Thank you for the reply, Vadim! I watch all of Rand's (and everyone elses) WBF's so I did see the one you reference before. I appreciate the call out from the video to be a little more specific to my question. We'll see if we can put this into action! - Cheers! Patrick

[vmialik]

Hi Patrick,

I had similar questions, and at this point the best method I rely on is by non other that Rand himself, from his whiteboard Friday video:

"How do I find opportunities to improve a page's ranking or its performance with users when I can't see keyword referral data? How do I know which page people are coming to? Thankfully, we can use the connection—the intersection of a few different sources of data. Pages that are receiving search visits is a big one, and this is going to be used throughout—instead of looking at keyword-level data, we're going to be looking at page-level data. Which pages received referral visits from Google Search? Thankfully, that's still data that we do get, and that'll likely stay with us, because we can always see a referral source, and we know which pages are loaded. So, even if Google Analytics were to remove that, I think a third-party analytics provider would step in."

Hope this helps!