Improving Not Provided in Google Analytics: What Will Change in SEO?

The number of “not provided” marks in Google Analytics continues to grow and may reach 100% this fall. A reasonable question arises: how to evaluate traffic projects in SEO and how to analyze search traffic from Google?

What is not provided?

What hides the queries in the “not provided” category in Google Analytics? These are conversions from the organic search for SSL protected users (https). Google encrypts user data that:

• Logged in to any Google account (Gmail, Google+, AdWords, Analytics, YouTube, Drive);
• Use Firefox 14 and higher versions, because Google search is done there via https;
• Enable the secure search option in your account settings.

So it was before. And now Google hides the data of absolutely all users! It does not matter whether the user is logged in or not, a search is conducted from a mobile or desktop. Exceptions are promised only for individual cases where Google cannot technically do this (for some devices and networks).

Safe Search Dynamics

According to experts, in November 2013 the number of requests in the “not provided” category will reach 100%. According to the official version, this is due to the increased security of search users and suppression of espionage activities by the US National Security Agency (NSA). This is how Google representatives justified their actions:
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“We want to provide security using SSL encryption for as many users in different regions as we can cover. Currently, we have introduced data transmission via the https protocol even for unauthorized users. We plan to further increase the number of encrypted user requests, considering this feature useful. ”

But now, in many of our projects, secure search hides up to 70-80% of search traffic from Google, making it impossible to determine which keywords exactly went to the site.



The example shows that in September of this year, 80% of the traffic from Google is transitions in the “not provided” category. Although in spring the number of hidden transitions did not exceed 30-40%:



It should be noted that changes have occurred in Google Analytics itself. We will no longer find the usual “Traffic Sources” tab; it has been renamed to “Conversion”, in which you can now trace the distribution of traffic across channels.

What danger poses 100% not provided?

The first thing you have to face is incomplete analytics. Website optimizers and site owners will not be able to track which queries lead to conversions from Google. But is this really a big problem ?! In fact, we lose only part of the data, and we still have access to full statistics on the remaining traffic sources in Google Analytics. In addition, there are other search engines, such as Yandex, Mail or Rambler, for analyzing web traffic. In any case, recommendations for improving the conversion will work equally well in both Yandex and Google. Difficulties arise mainly in new sites that do not have any statistics on Google. They will not be able to determine which queries google to go to their site, and what percentage of branded traffic there is.

The second problem is the rise in the cost of traffic from Google, due to the inability to separate requests by stop words. Until recently, the client paid only that part of organic traffic, which led SEO-company, excluding traffic on branded queries and that part of the natural traffic, which was before the promotion. Now, when all requests are hidden, we cannot isolate branded requests. Thus, the customer’s check will increase by the cost of traffic on stop words.

Having considered such a scheme unfair, we decided to try to determine the percentage of branded traffic in the “not provided” category.

Comparison of branded queries in Yandex and Google
We assumed that if the percentage of branded traffic in Google and Yandex matches, then the data available to us from Yandex can be extrapolated to Google.

To confirm our assumption, we conducted an experiment in which we compared the percentage of branded traffic from Yandex and Google in March 2013 (when Google had not yet concealed this data). The experiment involved several dozen sites of different subjects.



As can be seen from the table above (sample for 10 projects), for almost all projects, the percentage of branded traffic in Google and Yandex is very different. Based on this, we concluded that it is impossible to transfer data from Yandex to Google.

How to pay for traffic in SEO now

In our opinion, the most correct option is to consider branded traffic for Google in the proportion known for each site (derived when the statistics were still open). Indeed, the percentage of branded traffic for each site is totally stable, and this is clearly seen on the blue graph. The red graph shows a decrease in traffic by stop words (since July 2013), due to an increase in the number of hidden requests.



Taking the average percentage of branded traffic for the year, you can determine the amount of stop words in the organic traffic for each site.

Finally

So, even if all requests to Google are hidden, it will only lead to minor changes in the payment scheme for traffic projects and partial loss of analytics on organic traffic from Google, which is not particularly critical, since other search engines are available for analysis. In addition, the most popular search engine remains Yandex, which occupies about 54% of the market of users.



Attention (!): The article does not pretend to the accuracy and completeness of all data.