When Google announced that they were moving to default secure search for logged-in users of its search service, the reaction was generally positive. When marketers realised that this also meant that organic search keywords were going to be dropped from reports, their collective hearts began to sink.

It’s something everyone sees on their Google Analytics reports: one of the top keywords shows up as (not provided) – meaning that for all these visits, Google has stripped away their keyword in the name of user privacy, and isn’t giving it to us for analysis purposes. 

According to Not Provided Count, which tracks multiple websites’ instances of (not provided) keywords, over 38 per cent of all keywords are now removed from reporting. If that continues on its current trajectory, it's predicted that (not provided) will hit 100 per cent by July 2015.

Sadly, there’s no way of getting the data “back”, but we can infer some of the missing info. Here are a couple of methods.

• Easy: Google Webmaster Tools can be linked to your Google Analytics account to give you data on keywords searched by Google users, along with your approximate ranking. You can bring this data to your Google Analytics account by linking Webmaster Tools.

• Medium: In Google Analytics, go to Traffic Sources → Sources → Search → Organic and click on (not provided). In the next screen, click the Secondary Dimension drop down and select Landing Page. This will give you an indication of what those people were looking for when they searched for your site. While that’s not the same as knowing their keyword, knowing their intent is useful.

• Tricky: A hack has recently surfaced that allows you to find out which elements of Google Search people are clicking on to get to your site: regular search, Sitelinks, news search, video and knowledge graph. It’s fiddly to set up, but it’s another way of finding out something about a searcher’s intent. Warning, this is tricky and you might want to skip to slide 49 where the fun starts.

Overall, (not provided) is here to stay, and as a proportion of traffic it’s only going to get bigger. These methods will give you some insight, but it’s only a partial step back to the organic search data we were so freely relying on until recently.

If you’ve found any other ways of working with (not provided) data, we’d love to hear about them. Let us know in the comments.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Damion Brown is Principal Consultant at Data Runs Deep, a web analytics consulting firm based in Melbourne. He works with organisations to help them find the right mix of digital analytics platforms, then trains internal resources in how to work with and interpret the data. To find out more, visit datarunsdeep.com.au.

Check out SMK’s upcoming industry leading training courses in: Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane, Perth, Canberra, Auckland, Adelaide and Wellington.

Also, browse through hundreds of online social media video tutorials on eSMK Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube and more!!