IsaGeeks

If you’re using Google Analytics for your blog or personal site, you may have noticed “(not provided)” is showing up a lot in your natural search keywords.

If you’re not sure what I’m talking about, going to Traffic Sources > Keywords will show you the keywords people use in searches to get to your site. When you see these, you know how people are finding you, whether your SEO work is paying off, and even which specific keywords do better at becoming customers.

(Not Provided) now means they got to your site from search, somehow, but Google isn’t going to tell you more than that. And not knowing which keywords are getting you customers, you’re going to be doing a lot more guessing as to how to improve your site for search.

The reason is Google’s shift to protecting user privacy. With all of the Google users now signed in and using personalized search, Google felt those people’s data was insecure. So now anyone who is signed into Google and searching will have all of their information will have that information protected. That’s why you aren’t seeing what they popped into their Google search bar in your analytics anymore, and are seeing (Not Provided) instead.

So what can you do? Not much. Google is going to do what Google is going to do. You can still see keywords in your analytics reports, but those will be for people who either aren’t signed into Google, or aren’t using Google for searches. Signed in searches on Google are still a minority for the time being. You should still be able to see what keywords are important in analytics for the time being. You’ll just need to ignore these results Google no longer feels like sharing with you.