Not Provided Is Not Acceptable Google’s ‘not provided’ Top Keyword Data is a controversial topic, and there’s no failsafe way to access the data. Google changed the way it harvests data from search to protect users’ privacy back in October of 2011. This number continues to rise in your Google Analytics report because more people are using the many great services over at Google. For example, if a user is logged into a Google product (such as Gmail or any Google Account) when searching, their search is conducted over SSL. As such, the referral data relating to that search is hidden and thus “not provided.”

It can be worth investing some time into narrowing down where this traffic might be coming from and which pages they are accessing through a few workarounds that may help to improve the understanding of organic keywords and gain a better insight into your missing statistics. If this is continuing to be a very large percentage of your traffic, perhaps you just need to look at other methods to acquire better data.

If you are a marketing manager who recognizes that you just plain need better data to make intelligent decisions about your marketing and workflow, consider exploring marketing automation with Ocreative. We would work with you to streamline your reporting, efficiency, and ROI for your marketing and sales efforts. It’s important to know that marketing automation encompasses much more than analytics. To learn more about marketing automation, stay tuned for more blog articles in the coming weeks from Ocreative. Contact Ocreative to set up a consultation to see if a implementing a marketing automation plan would be a good fit for your business.