If you’re not aware of what “Not Provided” is, you’ve not worked in SEO. Last year, Google decided it was going to encrypt search data to better protect the security of the user. You see in Google Analytics, you could look at what phrases organic users had searched to get through to your website. Despite the fact that individuals couldn’t be traced through analytics and identified as searching certain phrases, Google stopped supplying keyword data.

Taking data from internet marketers made their jobs much much harder. Without the data in analytics, you couldn’t see what your client was getting found for and you couldn’t measure your success.

To add salt to the very open and sore wound of this, Google continued to supply keyword data to users of Adwords. On one hand it was “We’re removing keyword data to protect our users’ privacy” but on the other it was “you can still get this data if you use our paid service though”.

This naturally made a lot of people very angry and was widely regarded as a bad move. To help soothe people’s anger we wrote a guide on what to do with 100% not provided.

But now, it looks like Google will be rolling out the same restrictive measures to Google Adwords users too. Showing that they aren’t just trying to move people from organic SEO to Adwords, that they actually want to protect users’ privacy.

The source of this is unconfirmed but news is breaking on more and more sites that this is the plan for Google’s paid search.

Blog Post by: Greg McVey