What You Need to Know About Google’s “Not Provided” Search Query Data in AdWords

Google has made some changes in how they will report Keyword (not provided) for paid search data. There are a lot of rumors swirling about what this means, so here are the things you need to know.

First, you can still access your paid search query data. Just use the existing search terms report that is available in Adwords. This isn’t a new feature, it has just been renamed. It used to be known as the Search Performance Query Report.

For those who use a third party paid search platform to determine the effectiveness of their AdWords campaigns, those platforms will continue to work as expected since they access data via an API, which is not changing.

The only thing that is actually changing is the referring URL. It will no longer contain the search query like it used to. This might have an impact on some analytics applications that analyze URL strings rather than the Google API, but all of the data will still be available on AdWords itself.

Google has stated that this change is being implemented due to security concerns, however some experts believe that this is a preemptive way to prevent third party ad networks to access to their search query data.