(not provided) in Google Analytics = logged in organic searches
Google Analytics will no longer show searches made by logged in users (on Google accounts). Google is claiming this is due to increased concern about user integrity, but there is reason to believe that Google simply no longer wants to share all the information in terms of volume of search traffic on individual keywords.
This will cause major problems for those who want to monitor the volume of traffic on the most important keywords.
Search traffic from logged in users will appear as (not provided) in the reports of the keywords in Google Analytics.
The good news is that These searches will still be sorted into the organic search traffic, so that total will be unchanged in terms of organic traffic. Paid search traffic will be reported as before.
This is a clear change in policy by Google, who earlier released more and more data to users. Let us hope that this is not the beginning of increased secrecy by Google, which we hardly need more of, quite the opposite.
Comments
Google is getting some bashing from prominent SEO-people like Joost de Valk in this guest post on Seobook - Google Whores Out Users With False Privacy Claims which is actually some quite serious accusations against Google!
But there are certainly reasons to think that this is not mainly for privacy reasons they are making this change. And it will affect the possibility of monitoring keywords and see how they are converting through organic search, provided that a fair amount of users are actually logged in on Google when conducting searches, which I think is not the case currently!
The only way of getting full data on how keywords are doing will be through SEM since the will continue to report querys for those visits!!!! How´s that for privacy?
Mikael Jonsson
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