In October 2011, Google announced some big news regarding keyword data in their Organic Search results. Going forward, when a search is made on a secure Google web page and the result clicked, the search term would no longer be passed to the destination website.
Instead, these visits would simply be grouped together in Google Analytics under the keyword “(not provided)”. Google officially announced that this was done in the name of privacy.
If you are using Google Adwords, you can still use the {keyword} insertion tag and still grab the keyword that triggered the ad. Basically, if you are paying Google, they don’t mind giving up a little bit of privacy. But for Organic Search results, you are out of luck. This (not provided) keyword will only appear in Google Organic searches.
Other search engines are also jumping on this train as well, so don’t be surprised if you are not able to capture keyword data from most of your organic leads. But don’t worry though, if the keyword value is available, we will grab it and store it in the Term field.
Need more details on how keyword tracking is done? The video below explains everything you need to know.
This is a very in-depth video of how keyword tracking is performed with organic leads.