What Do You Do When Data Goes Missing?

Recently Analysts and Search Marketers have had to confront this dilemma: What do we do now that most of Google's referring clicks show up as "not provided" keyword?

In the past we had a great list of keywords that were delivering users to us, we could use them to measure performance and create even better content.

The instinctive response, including mine, was to say: "OMG NOOOOOOOO!"

It is understandable.

But if we've proven anything on the web it is that things are always evolving, even things we know for a fact, and can count on, turn out to be transient.

When working with digital platforms I've optimized my world-view to go through the five stages of the Kubler-Ross model, and get to being productive just as soon as I possibly can.

Back to the Secure Search case.

It turns out that while we have lost some granularity in our data we continue to have excellent capabilities at an aggregated view of search performance.

The multi-channel funnels report help us understand the precise number of direct conversions (driven by search) and assisted conversions (where search played a role).

The conversions path report helps us understand exactly where and how search plays a role - at the beginning, in the middle, towards the end. For paid and organic. And how search partners with other channels to deliver conversions!

The direct implication of this is that, ironically thanks to loss of detailed data, we can focus optimizing the strategic role of our search strategies.

We also continue to have access to other tools outside of our web analytics tools that give us insights about search keyword performance.

Start with the Google Webmaster Tools where Impressions and Clicks (hurray!) are shared for your top approximately 2,000 keywords.

Move on to using the Keyword Planner tool which can provide us deeper insights, by product, industry sector, or our website urls, most-relevant keywords people are actually typing into Google.

From there evolve to using Google Trends to understand the most statistically significant rising queries and top queries related to keywords most relevant to you - information critical to creating great content and driving focus to your SEO efforts.

And let's not forget that there are many SEO tools that will provide keyword level data for a short while, and strategic data for a much longer time.

You can see that we've lost some data that was immensely valuable to us (do you detect a note of nostalgia in my tone?), we have a lot more data than we thought we did. More than that, we have data that will drive strategic actions and big bottom-line improvements.

All that is required is that we are willing to look for these new possibilities, develop new habits, and perhaps work a little harder.

When it is not possible to get a piece of data anymore, the tough go looking for new possibilities to continue their path to awesomeness!

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PS: If you would like to dive deeper into Secure Search analysis, here's a detailed post: Search: Not Provided: What Remains, Keyword Data Options, and Future Possibilities.

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