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Understanding Anonymized Queries in Botify

Updated over a year ago

📘 This article provides an overview of how anonymized query data is handled in Botify.

Overview

Rare search queries called Anonymized Queries help give a complete picture of how people discover your website. These queries are not displayed in Google Search Console (GSC) to protect users' privacy. Since the GSC API does not provide the queries, Botify cannot collect the keywords. Anonymized queries are always omitted from the GSC table, but the clicks and impressions associated with anonymized queries are included in GSC chart totals. When filtering queries by a text string, these anonymized queries are filtered out of the chart totals, which causes a loss of long-tail clicks and impressions.

Read more about anonymized queries in the Understanding and Overcoming Google Search Console Limits with Botify article.

Anonymized Queries in Botify

RealKeywords report metrics include anonymized queries by default, though they are grouped with queries excluded by sampling. Without the Bulk Data Export integration, these “unknown queries” cannot be distinguished in RealKeywords. This integration enables:

  • Significantly reduced sampling. For some smaller websites, it may eliminate sampling.

  • Filtering unknown queries by anonymized and sampled queries.

Unknown query data is excluded if a RealKeywords chart is filtered by keyword or includes a keyword dimension.

Analytics Overview

Botify's Analytics Overview also contains anonymized query data in the "Indexable Pages with Google Impressions" and "Google Organic Impressions" metrics.​

rk_anon_ao.jpg

SiteCrawler

Botify’s SiteCrawler excludes anonymized queries because the data is pulled into Botify differently. This is why RealKeywords metric labels in the SiteCrawler URL Explorer are appended with “excluding anonymized queries”:

excludeanon.jpg

We recommend creating keyword data reports in RealKeywords, which has the following benefits:

Filtering Anonymized Queries

Use the Keyword field to filter RealKeywords reports by anonymized queries. Without the Bulk Data Export integration, the n/a value will filter the report by all unknown queries, those sampled and anonymized without distinction:

rk_anonquery_filter.jpg

With the Bulk Data Export integration, select n/a (Anonymized by Google) to filter anonymized queries and n/a (Sampled by Botify) to filter sampled queries.

rk_keywordanon.jpg

See also:

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