Information Madness

It is now over three months since Google announced an update which would hide the search referral keywords for organic traffic. As the results that are not provided show up only while logged into Google, the increase to over sixty million Google plus users tells us that the problem of search referral data is not going to disappear soon. How do you overcome problems like these?

One of the main problems that the Google update caused was the inability to distinguish between branded and non branded search traffic.  Taking out the branded keywords in Google Analytics was good enough to check how much traffic was coming to the website directly from SEO. Now, when you exclude brand keywords, you will see something like this,

This means that only 2,177 search referrals are keywords that are known. Out of the 373 not provided, we do not know whether they are branded or not. It is hard to track growth of SEO efforts over time.  There will be three steps to solve this problem.

1. There is an option to check the landing pages that each keyword was linked to from the SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages).
2. You have to filter the `not provided’ items. Once you click and check the landing pages and turn it on, you can scroll to the bottom and filter the results by typing in, `not provided’.
3. Look for “/”. Once you filter your results, you can easily see which of the `not provided’ results went to the home page and how many went to the internal pages. The number of `not provided’ results that went to the home page showing up as “/” will tell you approximately the number of branded keywords.