Some people are stats addicts by nature. Others track and analyze website statistics because it’s part of their jobs. Google Analytics has the reputation of The Most Correct Website Statistic Tool Available, but it seems that the privacy setting added by Google a year ago has now resulted in 39% of Google searches being marked as “Not Provided” (a 171% increase).
What does this mean for you?
This means that you now can’t see the data on keywords used by bunches of searchers who landed on your website.
To maximize the usefulness and knowledge gained through having something like Google Analytics installed on your site, a business owner can review the list of top keywords that drive the most traffic to their site, and use that data to improve their existing SEO tagging and discover blog topics to write about. But if an average of 39% (or in the case above, much more) of Google traffic is marked as “not provided”, you might feel a bit robbed that an incredibly valuable source of market research, if you will, has been cut off.
At this time, there doesn’t seem to be a good answer for replacing this type of data. If anything, the loss of search data reinforces the point that we can’t rely on any one tool to paint the whole picture for us.
Has this shift towards a higher percentage of “Not Provided” affected your intel?
