Google’s not provided statistic has been a prominent topic of conversation in the SEO world for some time. Since October of 2011 when “Google Dark” was born, we have seen a steady increase in the number of searches that are listed as not provided. There are websites such as www.notprovidedcount.com , that guesstimate when not provided will hit 100%. (Today not notprovidedcount.com suggests we will hit 100% not provided by 27th of December 2013) So how do we got about figuring out how people are finding our websites?
In previous blogs we have talked about using Google Webmasters tools to find this information. At the moment, webmasters tools still provides you with the top 2000 queries on any given day. One can take this data and see how people are finding the site and what terms are leading to clicks. This method of collecting data is a little flawed. Sometimes you will get a number of less than 10. So is that number 1 or 9? Its hard to measure. Recently Google has extended its webmasters tools coverage back to 90 days. Previously we could only view 30 days worth of impressions and clicks. So is this the only method?
Lucky for us Google announced Paid and Organic reports for those using adwords. Simply create an adwords account and allow your account to connect to your webmasters tools account. After you complete this step, create a new campaign. (Don’t worry you do not have to pay anything or purchase any terms with this campaign). Go to Dimensions and change your view to paid and organic. Presto! From the day your start running this blank campaign, your will record all the data that Google is with holding from your after the 90 day period. While this is not a perfect solution, this will keep a running tab of all your impressions and clicks for each search term recorded through Google.
By Matthew Wilkos