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As a follow-up to my post on (not provided) , in this post I give you *one* of the methods I use for capturing “(not provided)” keywords in Google Analytics. Just to be clear this solution is far from perfect and you will remain frustrated. As I said in my previous post, short of a Google Webmaster Tools API, there is no (not provided) silver bullet.

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If you work in digital analytics or SEO, by now you’ve heard about the web tracking phenomenon that is (not provided).

Since the end of 2011, Google has implemented measures to respect the privacy of Internet users on the words and expressions they use on its search engine. Specifically, Google is gradually switching searches to secure mode (SSL / HTTPS) and no longer passes referrer information to the search result website, which means that keyword information is lost.

As of now you can still know the source and medium (Google organic search), but the keyword is replaced with a useless “(not provided)” label.

The impact for marketing and SEO agencies seems enormous. Entire business models based on Google search could collapse.

Or could they?

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June 2013 EDIT: we now have a new Google Analytics dimension for day names:

I get this question a lot:

Which days of the week are the most profitable for my website?
How can I see Google Analytics days of the week?

You should know that this kind of information is not available as is in Google Analytics 🙁
(Now you know)

However, here is a method you can use to get to that information.

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In March 2012, Google Analytics launched an update to its reporting interface that was split into three tabs: home, standard and custom reports. This update mainly allowed for isolated Adwords reporting as well as real-time reports. In practice, going the extra click to get to real-time reports annoyed users more than anything else. The January 15, 2013 update rolled out by Google now divides the interface into two tabs instead of 3: reports and customization. For some obscure reason, Google has always struggled with the French versions of the interface 

“Reporting” (duh) points to the standard reports and “Customization” leads (surprisingly) to custom reports.

Standards reports now include a 2-section left hand side menu: “My Stuff”, which includes shortcuts, alerts and dashboards, and “Standard reports” which include all the Google Analytics reports you know and love. One could argue that the “My Stuff” section should feel at home in the Customization tab but after due consideration, they are probably accessed more quickly within Standard Reports.

Note that the Real-Time reports are now (logically) integrated into standard reporting. Adwords reports (which had gained their own private “Advertising” section in the March 2012 update) are now in the Traffic Sources menu, back where they belong 😉

Finally, you may already have access to the campaign attribution modeling tool (which had been reserved for Google Analytics Premium customers) in your Conversions reports:

This modeling tool allows you to compare the impact of campaign conversions whether they occur during the first or last interaction, or using linear distribution, etc..

As for me, I welcome the new, streamlined interface.

With that, I ‘m off to redo all my screenshots for my Google Analytics training support material 

A while back, I downloaded a bunch of funny pictures for various websites and before I erase them from my hard drive, I figured I’d post them here in a daily series. This series is a lolcat-esque set of cats set to HTTP server status codes. While most of you only know the basics (404, 403, 500), this is a great opportunity to review them 😉

We’ll start the series with 100 “Continue”.

Enjoy!

The 2012 Olympic Summer Games in London just closed!

Here is the occasion to congratulate all participating athletes and look back at a few years worth of medals.

Click here for a data visualization made with Tableau Software

• KPI Therapist
• Implementation Surgeon
• Data Chiropractor (my personal favorite, coined in 2011 and later during the SuperWeek conference in January 2012)

What is your favorite job title?

Web analyst?
Digital analyst?
Data scientist? (only if you live in California apparently)

Hi folks,

Rebounding on a discussion with my colleagues at LunaMetrics, there is definitely a need to measure the impact of the “long tail” in SEO, especially depending on the variety of keywords used. This is called NOK or number of keywords.

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