I’ve never tried it, but I wonder if sites could take advantage of the fact that Google “reads” a page much faster then people do – as long as the user/bot experience is consistent.

I examined three other sites today (one of which also uses PPC, but two of which do not) of varying sizes and all three had a 0% (not set) rate for the entire 4-month period I measured. Only the site I showed stats for in this post has (not set) listed under Google organic traffic. So I’m stuck on – what’s different between this site, and the three others?

“not set” has nothing to do with the 50k daily data table limit in the free GA version (premium goes to 1 million daily data table rows). When the daily data table limit is exceeded, etries beyond 50,000 are truncated into “other” and their data is still counted. I.e. the 50,001st unique keyword bringing traffic into the site on a given day would be changed to “(other)” in the GA reports and it’s session attributed to the same.

“not set” comes in when there is literally “nothing to set” for the term portion of the UTMZ cookie. You’ll get organic showing “not set” when you have a visit from a google domain come in that has the referring markers of an organic click, but no keyword query present. This is different from “not provided” in that it’s essentially a false-positive.

Hope this helps,

-Caleb

It becomes a problem when your demographic is made up of 50% of people who are almost always logged into Google Services, such as with sites that attract a heavy IT audience that isn’t super Microsoft-focused.

-Caleb