No More Keyword Data in Google Analytics!? Google

Goes Fully

In 2011 Google started removing keyword data for users who make searches while signed in to a Google account. The keyword information for these users began showing up in Google Analytics as “(not provided)”.

The amount of search traffic coming in without keyword data was small at first, but has steadily grown, particularly for tech and online marketing related sites.

What this means is that very soon you will not get any keyword data for Google search entries to your site. You will be left with three primary options for making decisions regarding your SEO:

What pages are getting search entries (organic landing page report).

What does this mean?

Google Webmaster Tools data.

Keyword ranking reports run by a third-party (or compiled yourself).

Each of these has problems of course. For instance, as an SEO you probably want to know whether certain keywords are driving conversions. You would also generally want to know overall how brand name traffic differs from non-brand searches. This type of analysis is impossible.

At the moment it doesn’t appear that this change has been fully rolled out. It’s more consistently showing for U.S. focused sites compared to Canadian or UK ones from what I’m seeing. It’s possible that Google might reverse their decision, but quite unlikely.Chances are good that you’re just going to have to get used to doing non-keyword traffic analysis. As noted above, there may be some good ways to cross reference various data to make decent educated guesses, but that’s the best you can hope for.

So what now?

ogle has been positioning this as a privacy change to protect their users. There are some merits to this argument, but at the same time PPC traffic is still going to be fully available for analysis. Similarly, the privacy concerns over keyword data are minimal at best.

Why would Google do this?

So Google says, the reason for the switch is to provide “extra protection” for searchers. Search Engine Land, however, suspects that Google may also be attempting to block NSA spying activity -- since Google was accused of giving the National Security Agency access to its search data back in June (which it has strongly denied). 

Why, Google ... Why?!

his meant that marketers were no longer able to identify which keywords a person who was logged into Google.com searched for before they arrived at your website -- even if they were using a web or marketing analytics platform

What All This Means 

Truthfully, it's hard to say. In terms of preventing Google from making this change, there's likely nothing you can do. We asked a few SEO experts to weigh in on the situation:

So What's a Marketer to Do?

http://blog.hubspot.com/google-encrypting-all-searches-nj

http://www.techwyse.com/blog/search-engine-optimization/no-more-keyword-data-in-google-analytics-google-goes-fully-not-provided/

References