Analytics

Last fall, Google began shielding logged-in users’ search terms from analytics. Plenty of sites found that their top keyword became “not provided.” Though it didn’t prompt a wholesale shift to Clicky or Bing’s Webmaster Center, many of us are wondering what that change did to our level of accuracy.

It’s unfortunate that the screenshot we have to show you for an end of year analytics analysis should be this one, because it’s very atypical. This is our lab site, FreshPlans, which was featured in the Google Doodle last spring, gaining that spike which dwarfs everything around it, making this chart useless.

It’s easy to share your analytics information with someone else. You’ll want to let your SEO pros get in and dig, of course, and you might also want to share the information with other team members.

Should you use Webmaster Tools, and if so, do you need Google, Bing, or both? We’ll answer this burning question with data from the webmaster tools for our lab site, FreshPlans.

We got access to the search queries, but we’ve lost some of our keyword data. Google will no longer show the keywords used by people who are signed into their Google accounts. Instead we are being told “not provided” for those visitors. For the week since the change took place, “not provided” was the #3…