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Video Summary
I recently received a message asking me if there is any way to find out what phrases people are searching for when Google analytics shows their keywords listed as “not provided”.
This is a really good question. The short answer is that “Not provided” is what shows up as the search keyword phrases for anyone who is logged into a Google account at the time they do the search.
That means that anyone who uses Gmail, YouTube, Google Plus, Google Analytics, or other Google tools might have their search data hidden from the results that show up in your Google Analytics data.
That can be a be a problem!
Fortunately, there is some other data you can get that helps tell a better story about the users of your site and the searches they did to get to your site.
You can find this in the Search Engine Optimization menu under Queries. In the video I show you how to find and interpret this data.
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Video Transcript
I recently received a message asking me if there is any way to find out what phrases people are searching for when Google analytics shows their keywords listed as “not provided”.
The message also asked me if they were doing something wrong that resulted in this condition.
First, I want to be clear that they are not doing anything wrong. And neither are you.
Several years ago, Google started an effort to make internet traffic and data more secure. Some of the data is falling into the category of user privacy so they don’t make it available.
In essence, “Not provided” is what shows up as the search keyword phrases for anyone who is logged into a Google account at the time they do the search.
That means if you have a Google Analytics account, or you use Gmail, or you have a YouTube account or Google Plus, or uses any of a number of Google tools, you could be logged into your Google account any time you do a search.
This is true for you and everyone else.
Since none of Google’s tools automatically log a user off when they leave the website, most users are always logged in to their Google account.
So, when you do a search, Google protects that search data and the keywords do not go into the analytics.
Unfortunately, this can leave a big gap in the organic search data.
So, what can you do about this?
The first thing to consider is that statistically, the phrases searched by people who are logged in to their Google account and those who are not, are likely the same phrases.
Odds are that most of the “not provided” keywords are distributed similarly, boosting the numbers of those phrases you already know about.
It’s the lesser used phrases that become the concern because if there is only one user in the world who finds your site with a particular phrase, and they are logged in to their Google account, you would never know what that phrase is.
But, on the other hand, how much does this one usage matter?
OK, let’s say that “not provided” accounts for the majority of keywords used or you cannot accept the statistical distribution of keywords and you still want more information. Can you get it?
Probably. At least, you can get a little bit more than what you are initially given. But there is a requirement. You have to connect your Google Analytics reporting with your Google Webmaster Tools account. If you have done that then you get access to Query data.
Let me go to my computer and show you this data.
First, let’s take a look at the list of keywords for a site.
Here you can see that 978 are shown as “not provided.” (We actually don’t have to worry about “not set.” Because on this page it refers to people who came to the site without keywords. In other words, they most likely they clicked a link somewhere to get here. They didn’t do it through search.)
Below “not set” you can see the list of real keywords used to bring people to the site. If I do a little math, I can see that there are only 157 sessions with real keywords, that’s 1,998 minus 978 minus.
So 157 sessions out of the 1,998 total sessions. That’s not a real good percentage of data that I actually get to know about.
But, if instead of looking at the keywords, I come down to the Queries page (which is in Search Engine Optimization and Queries), then I can see the data is quite different.
Here I can see that there were 868 clicks that came to the site, 462 the query is not set, which leaves 406 clicks worth of data which is considerably more than the 157 I was looking at on the previous page.
But, instead of focusing on keywords that were used to enter this site, we see a list of queries that resulted in this site showing up in the search results.
So, for example, the phrase expired chocolate showed up in the search results 897 times really good on the first page of the Google search results, yet it’s not getting any clicks. So, why is that?
This particular report gives me great information to analyze what I can do to improve the results to the site. That’s information I don’t even get when I just look at the keywords that resulted in someone coming to the site.
So if we break this down, the query is the phrase that was used in the search.
The impression is the number of times a page from the site was seen in the search results.
The clicks was the number of times that phrase was clicked to make it into the website.
The average position is where in the search results it appears.
And the CTR, click through rate, is the percentage of clicks over the number of impressions.
And this average position is quite useful because search is personalized. Two people can be searching for the same phrase and your site can show up in different positions. So this column gives an average of what position it’s showing up in.
So, for example, if 3 searchers search for an important keyword phrase related to your business and one searcher sees a URL to your site in the #2 position, another sees it in the #3 position, and another sees it in the #7 position, the average would be 4.0, that’s 2+3+7 divided by 3.
Instead of just seeing what keywords are used for people to find your site, this chart shows you where your site appears on the search results, and what percent of searchers actually get to your site.
Rather than basing your search engine optimization on what is already working, you can use this chart to help you determine where to focus. If you work to improve your average position and get a higher percentage of clicks to your site, then you will really be making good progress.
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