Tracked Google Users Result In 10% Of Keyword Data Lost
Following on from Dave’s experiment last week on (not provided) keywords – we decided to track logged in Google users on a site which gets a lot more traffic. Before I show you the results, here is the breakdown of the actual audience that visits this site, so you have some idea over how this might skew the results.
As you can see from the traffic stats above, it gets a reasonable amount of traffic – so we got some good results in a short space of time. There is an audience bias though, as shown below:
So we can see there are more women than men and they are mostly children – the household income doesn’t necessarily mean its the money earned by the kids! Anyways, without further a do, here is the break down of those who were logged into Google and those who weren’t:
The following pie chart is organic visits logged into Google (green), organic visits not logged into Google (blue) and all other traffic (grey), when taking the absolute figures of 5,985 organic visits logged in and 56,096 organic visits not logged in, it comes to around 10% of all organic visits will not display the keyword (for this website):












Jack Norell 557 days ago
http://www.jacknorell.com/That matches exactly what I’m seeing on some other sites as well. Pretty disappointing move from Google if you ask me.
Simon Jackson 557 days ago
http://www.bluelinemedia.co.ukI cannot believe that this is going to be a long term issue. Surely Google will realise that they are cutting off a valuable supply of data to the very people who fund it? It will be interesting to see the variation on and industry by industry basis as I can’t believe that some of the clients we deal with will have users that even realise you can be logged into Google. However, with the advent of Google+ and ever more google tools I guess the chances of people being logged in via one of these apps will only increase.
Paul 555 days ago
http://seojoey.com/I get the feeling Google are preparing to charge for GA down the line. If they can inhibit third party analytics tools now, more people will rely on GA and once they have their target audience, a small fee like $100 per annum would be worth billions to them. Just a thought.
David Whitehouse 554 days ago
I think Google Analytics is maybe worth more to them as a free tool. But who knows, its definitely a possibility.
Andrew Isidoro 549 days ago
http://www.seofosho.com/I think it may be more than a possibility. I mean, if Google could (and with their skill they probably could) limit the statistics of certain new SEO metrics such as the +1 button, they could have a bit of a monopoly on a key market.
Just a thought…
David Zimmerman 487 days ago
http://www.ephricon.com/I love the depth you went into, describing the makeup of “not provided” visitors but the raw percentages I pulled was completely different:
http://www.ephricon.com/blog/googles-percent-of-provided-keywords/
Granted, in this data I am not distinguishing between US-based and international visitors.