Google's 'Not Provided' Is Not a Problem

With the implementation of Google ‘secure search’ (Not Provided) in 2011 blocking 10% of the keyword data and impacting a whopping ~80% through the end of 2013 - thrusting yet another new challenge in the face of SEO - user clicks on SERP links are redirected through a Google masked keyword data process. This makes the keyword untraceable by the target website and the data from that query displays in Google Analytics as (Not Provided). The most frustrating aspect here is the inability to track website traffic that came through a Google search - a tremendous loss impacting the SEO world, from service providers to webmasters.

This is devastating to many SEO experts, who now no longer have access to important progress-related website analytics, both for themselves, and most important of all for their clients.

Rank Ranger Takes Action

Rank Ranger heard an enormous outcry from clients regarding the (Not Provided) issue and how it will impact the SEO community.  These are some of the questions that came up:

"How are we going to find an alternative for (Not Provided) keywords on Google Analytics?”

"How will we track and measure the organic traffic for our client’s keywords?”

"Bottom line results are important to our clients, how will we track and report on our progress?”

The Rank Ranger Team then questioned, what would be a good way to present accurate reports for our clients, that would enable them to provide their customers with progress reports without having access to this data?

We had a feeling that there was a need for a different approach. So our development team took a look at our existing Reach-Summary Domain metric and realized that we could take it a step further. We surveyed and collaborated with our client’s ideas and feedback, and we worked together on developing a solution. From the client’s perspective, their bottom line reports are missing crucial keyword data, so we thought, let’s change our approach. If our client’s focus is on progress and results, let’s turn (Not Provided) keywords into an opportunity to provide something better for them. This resulted in a new metric, a report that an SEO company could use to present keyword progress to a client. It provides an interface with guidelines, yet its dynamic design leaves it open for customization.

Introducing the new Market Reach report!

The Market Reach report provides a new scalable metric which is a type of TAM (Total Addressable Market) that measures the potential revenue of a business opportunity on a global scale. The new dynamic metric consolidates numerous SEO aspects into a single and final intelligible progress report!

Here is what our customer BETA testers had to say about Market Reach:

"...Reach data with Keyword rankings and landing page data allows us to better capture and demonstrate the value of organic search and SEO” (Zachary Bain@iDigitalStrategies)

"So much of what we do in SEO is behind the scenes, sometimes it’s hard to show bottom-line benefits..the Reach report tells you how visible you are in the SERPs, and ties your rankings to how many people you reach. It’s a better feel for what progress we are making, and a metric which makes perfect sense to clients. (John Rasco@RefreshWeb)

"The whole report is easy to use... Market Reach is like night and day, it takes minutes to use, and the reports are straightforward and reliable, and the tools are consistent.” (Anthony Parker, Director of Search Engine Marketing @Travel & Hospitality Agency)

Let's dig further into the Market Reach report.

Find Market Reach

If you are Rank Ranger client, log into your user account and you will find Market Reach under the Track tab.

Let's walk through the Menu Options:
Under Report Options -> General Settings you will find dynamic options and factors that you can play around with. Let’s explore the options and discover how they impact the way the report is presented.

Custom Report Title

Reach Metric Customize the report title using terminology that will be impressive and easily understood by your client, e.g., if you would like to change the name of the report to My Market Opportunities instead of Market Reach.

Reach Metric Name

Customize the name of the Total Organic Market Reach metric. You can use your own name for the metric, and also use HTML special characters such as "™” that will display the trademark symbol ™. 

Report Factors

Show or Hide the:

• Keywords Table
• Landing Pages Table
• Reach Column
• Total Volume
• Google Analytics Visits (data on both the Top of the Report and the Landing Page table)

Rank Change

We stressed before that the main concern of individuals is to see progress in a ‘bottom line’ report, and the SEO company’s ability to track and report on this progress. This tool enables us to compare previous to present data, displaying increases or decreases in the report’s factors. Compare to previous day, week, or month, or even set a custom date.
 

Rank Reach Value %

Rank Reach Value represents the percentage of potential traffic the website can gain based on the Search Engine Rank.

We have provided default settings for B2B and B2C plus an SEO preset to help demonstrate SEO efforts to your clients. You can also customize the percentage for each rank level based on your experience for a particular industry and/or location.

The percentages are based on behavioral studies indicating that individuals searching for a keyword will either click on first page results, or refine their keyword instead of clicking through to the next page of results.
 

Search Engine Market Share

Simply as its name implies, the search engine’s market share. Each search engine’s percentage of share is customizable and can be tweaked according to changes in the market at any time. Most important of all it can be fitted to the individual campaign, either when targeting an international campaign, or changing the percentage of focus of your marketing per search engine as you see fit.

We kept this open for editing as well because we feel that this can allow more flexibility by determining the values on your own. For example if your campaign is addressing the Italian market then you will need to change the numbers according to the Italian Search Engine Market Share (e.g., in Italy the Search Engine Market Share is different, Yahoo doesn't have 10%). Also, if you are only tracking and doing SEO for Google then you will want to set Google at 100%.


As with most Rank Ranger reports, there are additional options for displaying all or specific keywords, keyword tags, specific sites in your campaign, search engines, as well as data integrated from 3rd party applications.

As soon as you have finished customizing your options, it's time to view your report.

Generate Your Report

After you've made your selections, simply click the Apply Changes button and your customized report is generated. Let's take a look:

Approximate Monthly Searches represents the sum of all the Keyword’s Total Volumes found in the table.

Approximate Daily Searches is a calculation of the Approximate Monthly Searches divided by 30 days.

Total Monthly Reach equals the sum of all the Keywords’ Reach values for the campaign across all the search engines combined.

Total Organic Market Reach represents the Total Monthly Reach divided by the Total Volume of monthly searches for the keywords in the campaign.

The Pie Graph represents Total Monthly Reach. If you scroll your mouse over the sections of the graph you will see the Total Reach for each search engine.

Analytics Section data is integrated with Google Analytics.

• Total Monthly Visits include all traffic sources to your website.
• Monthly Organic Visits include all organic sources to your website.

Let's take a look at the tables on the report:

The Report Table

Total Volume

The Total Volume column represents the average monthly searches for a keyword on all search engines. We calculate the Total Search Volume using Google’s search volume value and divide it by the Google Market Share value (set in Report Options) and multiply it by 100 to reach the Total Search Volume.

For example if learn chinese language  has 430,000,000 average monthly searches on Google and Google’s market share is currently set to 70%, then the total search volume will be 430,000,000÷70×100=614,285,714

The initial search volume that we are showing on other reports is based on Google’s Keyword Planner tool (All locations and All languages settings). Rank Ranger allows you to customize the search volume and you can easily adjust it when you have campaigns that are targeting a local vs. global audience. Simply go to:  Campaign Settings -> Keywords to edit the search volume for your campaign keywords. 

Reach

The Reach column represents a Keyword’s potential market reach based on Rank (position in the search results), Search Engine Market Share (a particular search engine's percentage of market share), and Rank Reach Value (based on a business type factor set in Report Options). To calculate this the Total Keyword Volume is multiplied by the Search Engine Market Share and that result is then multiplied by the Rank Reach Value.

For example:

• If the Total Volume of the keyword learn Chinese language = 14,143 and the search engine share (in this case Google) is set at 70%, (see General Settings > Search Engine Share) we then calculate 70% of 14,143, resulting in 9,900 as the first step in our equation.
• The result is further calculated based on the Rank Reach Value (refer to Rank Reach Value % above for more information).

In our example we will continue with the 9,900 result and apply the Rank Reach Value factor. For example, if the rank for Google = 1, we look at the Rank Reach Value %, which in this case is 100%  and we will take 100% of the value which is equal to 9,900. If this keyword were ranking in position 11-20, we might apply a Rank Reach Value of 10%, dropping the Market Reach of this keyword to 990.

Let's move on to the next table:

The Landing Page Table

The Landing Pages table details the traffic volume for pages that contain keywords tracked in your Rank Ranger Campaign. We check each Landing Page's Google Analytics Organic Visits and then add all the Keywords that Rank Ranger is tracking for your campaign that are ranked for a specific landing page, thus revealing the Not Provided Keywords.



Last, but not least, the most important part of this report:

Keyword Screen (releasing the Not Provided keywords)

Click on the landing page link or the keywords' number value in this table and the Keywords pop-up screen reveals the rank for keywords that drive traffic to the specific landing page.  We check each landing page for Google Analytic Organic visits and apply all the Keywords that Rank Ranger is tracking to determine the keywords ranked for that specific landing page.



Refer to our Market Reach documentation for further information.  Not a Rank Ranger customer yet? Register for your free trial and begin using this report today or contact us to schedule an online demonstration.