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Provided Pie ChartIt’s super useful to know what queries bring audiences to your site. You can better understand your customers, make sure that you’re solving their problems, and can know how well your content is performing.
Unfortunately, most query data (from Google organic search) is no longer provided to web analytics programs. Most visits show up as “not provided”. This leads to two issues with query data:

  • Many queries don’t appear at all
  • The queries that do appear generally show lower than accurate visit counts.

Google Search Console (formerly Webmaster Tools) mostly eliminates the first issue and entirely eliminates the second issue: it lists most queries that brought traffic to the site (through Google organic search) and accurate visit counts for all queries it lists.

However, it doesn’t always provide 100% of queries. The reason is different than the “not provided” problem though. Google Search Console doesn’t show all queries because it shows only top queries. (How many qualify as “top” vary widely depending on the traffic patterns of the site.)

Keylime Toolbox can mostly get around that issue. Here’s how it does it:

  • Google reports top queries for each site added, and it considers every subfolder to be a separate site. So the more subfolders you add, the more queries Google reports.
  • But that’s not the whole story. All subfolder data is going to include some duplication with the folder above it. For instance, www.example.com will include some query data for the root of the site, as well as some query data for www.example.com/folder1 and www.example.com/folder2. And www.example.com/folder1 will include some query data that’s also listed in www.example.com/folder1/subfolder2.additional-notprovided-01
    Keylime Toolbox solves that by aggregating all the data together and then removing all of the duplication. The end result is the maximum number of queries possible!
  • Keylime Toolbox then matches the queries that show up in both Google Analytics and Google Search Console data. It generates an Excel file that shows you the visit data for each query from each source and then adds up the totals using the higher count.
  • After all that, some visit data is still “unknown” (that is, not associated with a query). Keylime Toolbox estimates how this traffic likely is distributed and calculates “estimated totals” for each query segment.

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Next: Data Integration Set Up