So, what are you doing right now. Link building? Stop it. Link removing? Stop it. Stop writing content, stop reading content, stop eating, sleeping, pooping, whatever it is you are doing and do this right now. As of writing this post, it is now September 30, 2013 and time is running out…
Google Webmaster Tools and Not Provided
If you haven’t heard yet, on September 23, Google laid down the law with (not provided), pushing 100% (or near to it) of their web search traffic through HTTPS, effectively killing keyword data being passed through referrers. This will impact every type of keyword-based analytics reporting out there, not just Google Analytics.
Our best weapon against this loss is predictive analysis. By using a mixture of Google Webmaster Tools keyword data, Google Analytics aggregate data, keyword data, and rankings data, we can make inferences about the breakdown of traffic we have coming to our site. However, the best way we can model this is if for some period of time we have both Google Webmaster Tools data AND Google Analytics Keyword data.
Google has promised to increase the keyword history up to 1 year, but right now we are still stuck at 90 days. Let’s hope Google keeps their promises, but until then, we should get that data ourselves now. This means we only have 90 days of training data where we build a model that compares GWT data to actual traffic. Unless you are already using a service that is consuming your GWT data on a daily basis, you might not ever get a chance to get this training data back. So go get it now.
So, here is what you do…
1. Log in to Google Webmaster Tools
2. Use the form below to generate links to day-by-day data for your.
3. Click on each link then choose “Export” and save as CSV.
4. Congratulations, now you should have around 90 CSVs that you can compare to Google Analytics when Google Analytics actually had keyword data.
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