Keyword Not Provided in Google Analytics – what does it mean?

Not Provided is a section that you can find in Google Analytics. It gives information about the keywords through which users came to the website from Google search engine. These phrases were initially available, but after introducing changes regarding encryption, some data was hidden. Currently, people analyzing the page entries from the free search results can obtain only partial data on user visits. Google Analytics Not Provided holds Information from which phrase we gained traffic, unfortunately without open access. However, there are ways which allow for partial access of unavailable information.

How to get Not Provided keywords in Google Analytics?

There are several ways that allow you to partially discover hidden words. However, it needs to be noted that the difficulty of hidden phrases occurs only in the case of organic search results. People who are involved in paid advertising PPC have access to information regarding the keywords that users write to get to the website. In a certain situation when the marketing of our site focuses on both solutions, we can very easily analyze many phrases using data from paid search results. However, if you only focus on unpaid solutions, you can use other methods.

Search results in Google Search Console – the most common queries

Everyone who runs a website should use Google Search Console. This is another solution by Google (beside Google Analytics) that allows us to track how users arrive at and navigate on our website. In the Effectiveness section, we can see the queries that are typed into the search engine. The numbers that appear below the word “Clicks” is the number of users who came to the page after particular phrases, which you can read on the left side below “Most frequent queries“. Additionally, GSC presents other data about websites, countries, devices, and number of impressions that can be used for even more precise keyword analysis.

Landing pages and internal search engine – GA

Even though Google Analytics Not Provided hides information about keywords, we can use its other options and check where new users arrive on our website. We are talking about Target Pages section, that appear in different places of GA, depending on which version of Google Analytics you currently use:

• GA 3 (Google Universal Analytics) – go to the Acquisition section, then Search Console and select Target Pages.
• GA 4 – in the sidebar, select Reports, then go to the Engagement section and select Pages and Screens. Then in Number of Events, select the session_start parameter.

In both of the above cases, we will get information about which subpages were visited by users. Unfortunately, we do not have information about exact phrases, but we can try to guess them, looking at titles and URLs of target subpages.

Internal site search engine

Another feature in GA that can help you to get to know additional keywords is analyzing searches in the site’s internal search engine. To set up this service, you need to enable tracking in the view settings and enter a query parameter. It allows us to track search terms on our site, which are available through: Behavior/ Navigation-> Site Search -> Search Terms.

What is Keyword Hero used for?

Keyword Hero is a tool that combines data from many sources and then finds out Google Analytics Not Provided words based on that data. As with the other methods, this software does not display all the missing phrases. Once the tool is properly integrated with Google services, it is used as an extension that shows revealed keywords directly in Google Analytics.

Other external tools

There are many other tools outside of Google, such as Semrush, Senuto, Ahrefs, that give information about the keywords on your website. Unfortunately, none of these tools will present us with 100% confirmed data on which phrases users typed to reach our site. When verifying keywords in the previously mentioned tools, we should take into account our current position and the number of searches for a given phrase. The higher the number of searches and the higher the position of our website, the higher the probability that the phrase contributed to gaining a new user on our website.

Summary

All the mentioned methods allow us to find out or guess what issues allowed users to reach our site. Summing up, the discussed tools can be divided into free and paid ones:

Free Tools:

• GA
• GA (Internal Site Search Engine)
• GSC

Paid Tools

• Google Ads
• Keyword Hero
• Semrush, Senuto, Ahrefs

Depending on the method you choose, you can find at least some keywords from Google Analytics Not Provided section.