Mediaboss Marketing

There seems to be a school of thought that Google Webmaster Tool data is useless and inaccurate. General bugginess, delayed reports, showing average position in search results, and rounding numbers has led to many disregarding the search query report in frustration.

When John Mueller was asked during a Webmaster Hangout why rounding clicks was necessary, if there could ever be an advanced option showing actual numbers, and how many people would have to sign a petition for them to reconsider, he disappointingly said they just thought itd be better if the numbers were bucketed.

While we can see how they might need to round impressions to help compensate for automated queries, clicks seem to be correlated enough with visits to make a conservative estimate of (not provided) data. This is my hypothesis. I need help experimenting, but here is my methodology.

The key is understanding how Google decided to round, or bucket clicks. After consolidating data across several sites this list was generated, showing how Google decided to bucket search query clicks.

In essence, Visits from a custom Google Analytics report need to be inserted into the downloadable Google Webmaster Tool search query report. Begin by creating two reports in your browser.

The GA Custom Report contains:

Google Webmaster Tools search query report contains:

See original here:
Recovering (Not Provided) Keyword Data