Increasing Percentage of "Not Provided" Keywords

Making Keywords Increasing Useless in Analytics

[jimh009]

When Google launched their "privacy" protection by blocking out keywords used in Google Analytics for people logged in to their google account, the % of keywords "not provided" was initially fairly small. On my sites, it averaged around 10% or so at the beginning.

However, with the seemingly increasing popularity of the various Google services, the percentage of keywords "not provided" for Google organic search has surged across all my sites. I'm now averaging around 30%+ for all my sites. This is, needless to say, making keyword information for organic search less and less useful in Google Analytics.

I'm wondering if I'm the only person seeing an ever-increasing amount of "keywords not provided" in their Google Analytics organic search metrics?

[lucy24]

It doesn't have to be GA; you get the same result in piwik. "No keyword" is always at the top of my list. Same thing in your raw logs. At best it's "q=" and then jumps straight to "cd=somenumber". (Oh, how nice, I came in at the top of someone's search. Now if only I had some clue what they searched for ...) At worst it simply shows up with google dot com as referer with no hint that there was even a search involved.

Q: How does this work in wmt? Look at searches and pages and there's no hint of missing search terms.

[phranque]

it's been just over a year since this started.
most of the sites i've looked at are now in the 30%+ range and this tells me about 1/3 of the general search public are logged in.
in some cases the percentage is significantly higher.
haven't seen 50% yet...

How does this work in wmt?

GA depends on the HTTP_REFERER Request header to get keyword information.
GWT can get that information before the HTTP Request is sent.

[onlineleben]

GA depends on the HTTP_REFERER Request header to get keyword information.
GWT can get that information before the HTTP Request is sent

So comparing downloads of GWT and GA would reveal the missing keywords complete with ranking information from GWT. More work and not real time, but manageable.