Rathores blog

I had so wondered why does Google Analytics, or any other marketing tools, intelligence platform shows a summary of keywords like “not provided”. When I get traffic from organic search results? To my experience I’m getting a good amount of traffic from SERP’s but most of the traffic as a keyword “not provided” which makes it look strange to me…! So, now my mind has set in thinking of where does all my keyword research and On-Page SEO goes off? And why does these keywords hidden in the Google Analytics report?

My question remained unanswered…!

Later I taught of checking what the recent Google’s algorithm updates are. To know why actually this is happening. Coming to back in the mid October 2011, there were many changes taken place in the Google model. At the same time we also got “https” the secured search came into existence, this is one of the responsible for the keyword showing “not provided” in Google Analytics. If you want to access the most recent common report: (Just go to Traffic Sources -> Search -> Organic) to view the report on Organic traffic.

Great…! I got the answer for my question.

Here’s why it showed up like that.

It’s just simple, many people access Google in their day to life for things to know about. So, basically most of the users get signed into Google. Here is the issue of “not provided” keyword comes, when the user is signed into Google and goes with an organic search, to access a respective site. It results of not showing up any keywords in the Analytics report because the user is signed into Google. Such that whatever the user searches for with a keyword it just shows up “not provided” and shows up the traffic is organic. There is reasoning behind this issue, Google answered that this model has been made for protecting the user’s privacy and it has been stated that it would be just a small part of our overall organic website traffic. So…! Do I miss anything? Oops forget to say even Google+ growing higher and other Google services. So, they tied into one single privacy policy, such that even most of the users of marketing analytics are finding the keyword “not provided” in their results which is the most popular keyword now.

Overall message

When your signed into Google and search for a specific result to reach a respective website, the organic keyword will be recorded as “not provided” in Google Analytics report. If a user is not signed into Google then the situation is different.

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