Google Paid Search Terms

Just wondering why all of a sudden on advertising section why there is a lot of clicks on my clients and showing secure search now WITHOUT key phrase that was typed in? *FRUSTRATED*

and blanks throughout the right hand column?

Beginning early in 2013, Google started to withhold the search terms whenever a person does a google search while logged in to their google account. Eugene Ware of Noble Samurai recently reported that over the past 12 months, the percentage of hidden search terms on web sites he oversees went from around 15% hidden keywords in March 2013 to as much as 85% hidden keywords in March 2014. That means on some of the sites he only sees about 15% of the search keywords that bring traffic to the site. All the rest just say "[secure search]".

So this becoming a well known issue in which Google intentionally hides search keywords from webmasters when those searches are done by people logged in to their Google accounts. Over the years, as Google was buying up more and more internet properties they also unified all the separate logins into a single Google account login. So more and more people are logged into Google accounts even if they aren't Gmail users.

It's a pain for webmasters. One suggestion made by Eugene was to go back a year in and compile a list of all your keywords that brought traffic to your web site over the past 12 months. This way you can see a lot of keywords that have been increasingly hidden. If you have data on goals and conversions then so much the better. The theory is that if you look at the top 100 keywords over the past year they are probably still relevant even if Google is hiding them from you on recent Google searches.

This isn't something Clicky can do anything about. Same trend in other tracking tools because the data is simply no longer provided by Google. You won't find it in the query param passed to your web site from Google, and it won't show up in the web server access log or any of the tracking tools like Clicky which log search keywords.

Not sure what you mean by blanks in the right hand column, maybe you could elaborate on which report you are referring to on that.

thanks for the info and advice, this is a report from clicky yesterday on a clients advertising section, see below.

1:12pm Dover, DE, USA Verizon Fios Quick view 10 actions 6m 27s
1:05pm Phoenix, AZ, USA Centurylink Quick view 8 actions 3m 56s
1:02pm Southington, CT, USA At&t U-verse Quick view 10 actions 4m 54s
12:56pm El Paso, TX, USA Time Warner Cable Quick view 8 actions 3m 18s google.com Vegas Weddings Las Vegas, NV