How to Solve The “Not Provided” Problem in Google Analytics

Google Analytics: The “Not Provided” Problem

Google analytics is a fantastic tool for viewing visitor trends and behaviour. It helps you to figure out what your website is doing right or wrong, and to see how effective your current SEO strategy is performing.

The one problem many people have with the service is its organic search terms report. In this report, you can see what search terms are giving you the most visitor traffic. However throughout this report the term “not provided” regularly appears and the content is not accessible to the business, although this information is available to those who have a paid premium account.

Why is this data hidden?

 In 2011 Google updated their privacy settings, focusing on protecting those with a Google account (Gmail, Google+ etc). If a person conducts a web search through Google whilst they are logged into a Google account, then their search is conducted over a Secure Socket Layer (SSL), therefore the referral data relating to that search is hidden.

This referral data contains some very useful information, such as the keywords used to perform that search. This data is however only viewable to Google and those with a premium analytics account.

There are ways around this for you with basic accounts. One such way involves analysing landing page results. This involves mining through Google Analytics for other information that will reveal more about who your visitors were and what they were doing on your site. This involves 3 steps;

1. In your Analytics account, head to Admin, then Profiles.
2. Click the name of the profile you want to work with, and select the Filters tab.
3. Create a new filter in your Analytics account and follow the guidelines in  the image below:

After applying this filter, future keyword reports while provide some more useful information. Instead of “not provided” appearing in the report, it will be presented as

 “np – / landing page”.

 While this doesn’t reveal the actual search term used by the visitor, it does show you what page within your site appeared in their search result. This can give you the information  of which pages within your site are appearing on search results. This new data will only be presented like this for future reports.

Why use Google Analytics?

Measure Your SEO performance:

With Google Analytics you can analyse your current SEO strategy and see what keywords are working for you. It will also show which pages on your site are most popular. You can assess the amount of traffic coming into your site, and quantify goals and conversions. If you have any questions regarding Google analytics, please contact us.

Google Analytics Event Tracking Guide

After spending time and money investing in extra features for your website it is important to assess how well they are performing. Depending on what you want these features to achieve is up to you but key areas of focus should always include user engagement, load times, bounce rates and actions users are taking.

 

Our event tracking guide looks at how to measure all user activity on your pages and separate these from your regular page views. Once the event tracking is set up you can use it to track activities such as:

• Page gadgets or widgets like Social Media toolbars
• Embedded AJAX page elements.
• File downloads including PDF documents.
• Load times for data.
• Any Flash-driven element, like a Flash website, or a Flash Movie player.

Your reports use the values you assign to categories to give you an idea of your visitors’ behavior. Read our full article to find out how to use the various components involved in Event Tracking to produce quality reports.

Out with the old, in with the New.

The “New Version” of Google Analytics offers users a host of new insights. While some of the analytics tools are similar to the previous, there have been a number of updates that allow you to customize your reports even more. Here are a few of the reasons why you should update your account:

1. Enabling Site Speed: This a ranking factor with Google.
2. Enabling Site Search: Making sure your customers use your search box.
3. Track Events: A must-have for all e-commerce enabled sites.
4. Multi-Channel Funnels: Track all your visitors sources.
5. Custom Dashboards: The new Google Analytics allows you to create up to 20 custom dashboards.

If you haven’t updated your Google Analytics account yet, read our full article and find out about all its new features.

How to Monitor your Social Media with Google Analytics

So you’ve looked at your direct, search and referral traffic and have gained some valuable insights about your users but you still can’t measure your social media presence. Well don’t panic as there is a simple way of tracking your social media efforts within Google Analytics.

The challenge is segregating your social media data from all existing search traffic data.The key here is adding a variety of “Advanced Segment Filters” to your existing analytics account.

By adding these filters you can measure the number of visits, bounce rates, time spent on site and the percentage of new visits as a result of your social media activities.

To find out more about advanced segment filters  and measuring your social media simply click here and read our full article on ‘How to Monitor your Social Media with Google Analytics’.

5 ways to make Google Analytics benefit you

Google Analytics is a free product that tracks your website and gives detailed statistics about visitors to your website. For example, Analytics can show you how exactly people found your website, how they navigated around it, and how you can enhance their overall visitor experience. This information can help you improve your websites return on investment, increase conversions, and make more money through the web. There are many benefits that come with installing Google Analytics on your site. Listed below Google have outlined the top five things you can do as soon as you start tracking your site with Analytics:

Tips for using Google Analytics

On the web today, it’s highly important, and profitable, to know a little bit about the traffic on your website. If you can know how much web traffic you have, what they do on your site, what your conversion rates are, and other related information, you’ll be able to better optimise your site to receive the best possible results. A excellent tool that can help you keep track of all of this is Google Analytics.

Here’s a few tips to help you get the most out of Google Analytics: