How “not provided” is ruining my life
Get ready for a rant, I have a massive amount of beef with Google at the moment, at the best of time I have a love/hate relationship with them but November has been a month of demonic hatred, and the thing is, there are 2 huge reasons for this. I will write about the second reason in another post, it involves me wrestling a bear ;) more info at the bottom of this post.
Problem 1 – “not provided”
Google have recently announced that they will be withholding data from people searching while logged in, this is annoying as shit.
Those of you that read my article regularly will be aware that the main tool that I use for both keyword research and for adding those lovely long-tail keywords to my seo to bring in that next level of moolah. The recent announcement stops me from knowing which keywords people are using to access my sites. This is fine for most sites but I have one site that has around 60,000 unique search engine visitors per month. As of last night the number 1 keyword that people are using to access my site is my standard keyword that my domain is named after etc. Great people are getting to my site the way I set it up for them.
HOWEVER, coming in at number 2 with almost 6,000 searches this month = “not provided”. It doesn’t really effect my numbers too much because those visits are still coming to the site and doing the same thing that they normally do. The problem is that I can’t see exactly what they are doing or who is doing what. This will not affect my traffic so much but it should significantly start to bother my users, each month I give 1 day to each of my sites to see what the previous months visitors did, did a certain page have a higher bounce rate than others? Did people accessing my site using a certain keyword have a shorter time on site than other keywords? These are the types of questions that I ask myself so that I can optimise my pages, create new pages to match what people are looking for on my sites.
The confusing thing is that I cannot for the life of me see what Google are getting out of doing this, unless they are planning on releasing a premium analytics service to have access to all of the data then they are in no way adhering to their mission of “making the internet better and more relevant”, if you think about it critically, they are in fact doing the opposite. If I cant see what my users like/ don’t like / want on my sites then are bound to have a worse experience.
Problem 2 with “not provided”
This second problem is unconfirmed as of yet but it is something I have noticed happening more and more since November, when I am searching for keywords to build new sites around, Google Keyword Tool seems to be bringing my skewed data.
I am currently doing a little project that I will write you guys a case study on in the next few months, it involves me finding a profitable niche twice a month, buying it and doing some initial work, with the hope of finding the “winners” quickly and then either selling or shelving the other sites for another time.
The problem is that one of the sites that I bought last month had a shit load of potential, 9.9k exact match searches per month, CPC of almost £29, it is in a market that people don’t really know about unless you are in the industry, I only found out about it due to a business meeting I had a few months ago where I met one of the innovators of the field.
Anyways, yesterday when I checked the stats for the site, I had noticed there was pretty hefty traffic coming in, way too high for the number of searches it gets a month and its position in Google (I later found out that the site is ranking at number 1 in Yahoo which is bringing in a ton of traffic that I wasn’t expecting. But when checking the keyword tool, I noticed that the results were 0s across the board. No monthly searches, no CPC yet my analytics show hundreds of visitors.
I have not confirmed that this is necessarily due to the way that google is collecting its data these days or just a mistake of some sort. I’ll get back to you when I know more, but for now it worries me that people could be missing out on amazing keywords due to false reports from keyword tool.
SIGH, that’s google for you. We will never be ahead of the curve with them. I am also about to write another post on me wrestling with Google Pandas late October algorithm update, that kicked my main money sites ass this month. However bears are stupid and I am super clever, so I won :), read about it HERE!
