Google Hides Search Referral data

You may have noticed recently on your ana­lyt­ics account that a new cat­e­gory has been appear­ing in your key­word traf­fic results – this cat­e­gory is appear­ing as:

(not Pro­vided)

Not too help­ful I’m sure you’ll agree. We’ve had many clients ask us what is going on and why this is hap­pen­ing.

Logged in Key­word Search is Not Pro­vided

This new cat­e­gory is fired when a Google user is logged in to their own Google account when brows­ing. If they search for ‘blue wid­gets’ and click on the web­site ‘www.bluewidgets.com’ the web­mas­ter would usu­ally be able to see that the vis­i­tor searched for ‘blue wid­gets’ and came to their site via that key­word. Not any more. This infor­ma­tion will only be avail­able if a user is logged out of their Google account.

Clearly this is pre­sent­ing a few issues for those inter­ested in and reliant on accu­rate ana­lyt­i­cal data for ongo­ing mar­ket­ing.

Why is Google doing this?

Google has stated that this change is to pro­tect user pri­vacy when they are logged in. It seems strange to offer this as a default set­ting when a user who wishes to have their brows­ing habits remain anony­mous may select the secu­rity of https search man­u­ally. If this is not selected surely the assump­tion should be that the user is happy for a web mas­ter to know what keyphrase they searched for in order to find their web­site.

It is also inter­est­ing to observe that if you click on a Google Paid ad the search query IS reported in ana­lyt­ics.

Why is Paid Search Reported Even if Logged In?

There is no offi­cial stance on this. Many other ad net­works are being very suc­cess­ful in using search refer­ral data from ana­lyt­ics and tar­get­ing their cam­paigns accord­ingly. If this refer­ral keyphrase data is only avail­able via Google Paid Search this cements Googles Paid Search as a mar­ket leader.

What Can You Do?

We at Igni­tion Search are mon­i­tor­ing what the real impact of this is to our own search results and keep­ing an eye on the per­cent­age trend of data now being reported as (not pro­vided). We sug­gest that you do the same.

What we need to estab­lish is what vol­ume and per­cent­age of data are we los­ing and report this to Google. The over­all rea­son for Google doing this seems to be at odds with Google’s gen­eral pol­icy and ethics so we’re sure they will be wel­com­ing feed­back.

Take a look at an emer­gency White­board Fri­day that SEO Moz pro­duced here.