If you have logged into your website’s Analytics account even over a year ago, you may have realized that there were some organic keywords from Google reported as (not provided).
This was a bummer back then with just a small percentage of them, but in the last few months it has actually got much worse. As of the past 30 days for 1 of my websites, 57% of all my organic traffic is now not reporting any keyword data.
There may be many reasons to why some of the searches were blocking reported data to websites who track this info before, but one of the major reason was because Google was preventing it from showing up when a user was logged into a Google Account. With the rise in their social media network Google Plus, they implemented privacy settings which would keep a lot of their information private.
Now, as of a few months ago, Google started to show less data than ever through organic search’s keyword Dimension. It is no real surprise to me either with all the public concern about both governments and corporations intruding on our privacy. People are also becoming more knowledgeable about tracking technology on the internet and the recent leak from Edward Snowden gave us some insight about what has been going on behind close doors.
To give you an example of people becoming more aware, I’d like to tell you about a recent incident that happened to me. I have run a website which generated millions of visitors for the past 5 years with no one ever emailing me about my site tracking through Analytics. Now my site gets much less traffic than it use to, but yet I’ve recently received a very angry email from a visitor about my site intruding on their privacy.
Being a small business owner putting out information on the web, I was rather upset at first for some random person to use my site and send me rude emails and comments on my blog. I told him that it was documented in the privacy policy/ terms of use and that I was just using it to help improve my site for others in the future. Well this didn’t go over well with him and he continued to complain. Although it was rather over the top, I do understand his frustration with all that is going on in the world. I wouldn’t doubt that there are many of these type of people now roaming the web, complaining to the webmasters and Google directly. And Google will always treat their users with the highest importance because they are what makes them a multi-billion dollar company.
