Not provided in Google Analytics: What it is and how to avoid it

[shukla7789]

SEOs , and SEO apprentices, have a love-hate relationship with Google . On the one hand , it's the one that feeds us, since clients pay us to help them rank in the almighty search engine, but on the other hand, we rack our brains trying to get inside its heads and figure out the best way to rank. To be fair, Google itself helps us in our work, giving us some tools that are very useful. This is the case of Google Analytics , which you surely know.

Managing Google Analytics is essential for anyone who has a website. Its statistics give us juicy information about where our traffic comes from and whether we are doing things right. However, sometimes it leaves you wanting more. For example, when we want to know the search terms by which a user reaches our website through the search engine, the term not provided usually appears in first place . And what's more, it accounts for an exaggerated percentage of visits, meaning that in most cases you can't know which keywords they are finding you with. It's quite frustrating.

What does not provided mean?
Those who have been in this for a while say that the percentage of visits attributed to not provided in Google Analytics has increased alarmingly in recent years. The term not provided is made up of keywords from searches made by users when they are logged into their Google account (something that happens when they enter services such as Gmail, Google Docs or Google Plus).

The official explanation given by Google for not providing data for these keywords is to defend user privacy. Google's efforts to preserve the privacy of its users are very laudable, although it may be a bit out of place cash app database the idea of ​​passing our data to the NSA. Also, it just so happens that if you run an Adwords campaign (that is, paying Google to show you in its promoted ads for a keyword), you can see all the searches you get even if the user who does it is logged into Google. This has led some people to say that what Google wants is for us to pay to access the information hidden behind the not provided. This is something that I don't think is bad, I clarify, because at the end of the day Google is a company and seeks profit, but I do think that if that were the case they shouldn't hide it so much.

How to bypass not provided?
The presence of biases in metric analyses as a result of not provided has led to the development of alternatives to compensate for the loss of information. Of course, these may provide approximate values, however, they allow for obtaining analyses closer to what is sought.

Some of the options are:

Google Search Console: This tool provides companies with information about their websites. They have access to two thousand daily searches to check keywords, clicks obtained, impressions, etc.
Surveys: These allow you to understand how a user arrived at your site. On-site surveys can be programmed to only appear when the person arrived via a search engine.
Google Adwords: This is a tool that helps you find the keywords that users have used the most when performing their searches. Although this tool offers very general information, it is useful for guiding SEO strategies.
External tools: Platforms like Ahrefs, although they do not evade the not provided, do allow you to know the URLs that have the most traffic on the web and the keywords best positioned for those URLs.
Landing pages: also known as landing pages. Companies use them to associate a keyword with a destination page for organic traffic. This technique allows them to know whether or not the user found the website using that keyword, and whether it is the most suitable for the site.