One of the most confusing things for people once they begin to use analytics and really start to drill down into the data is seeing entries or information where Google Analytics displays that it isn’t quite too sure what is going on. So in this post I will highlight some of the ones I commonly see and offer a brief explanation on how to interpret the data.

(not set)

Now this item can appear in various places in various Google Analytics reports. So I will attempt to cover the most common areas it can appear and explain the reasons why.

(not set) in the Geographic Report

GA picks up geographic data primarily from your IP address. This IP lookup is conducted using a 3rd party vendor (ie. not Google themselves). According to the documentation then, if the 3rd party was unable to identify the location of your IP, it will set it as (not set). If your visits view your website through some proxies, it could be one reason for this.

(not set) in the Campaign Report

This one is a nice and easy reason. Basically you haven’t tagged your links correctly and there was a problem parsing the data. Use one of the many URL builders and other analytics tools provided by Google and others to make sure your custom tagged URLs are formatted correctly.

(not set) in Traffic Report

Since there are new portals, search engines, social networks and other websites appearing online almost everyday, it is impossible to keep up with them all. Hence for some of the smaller ones that are yet to gain traction, they are not included in Google’s list (think Bing – when it was launched Google was a few days behind on including it in its search engines list). So until GA figures out the best way to identify the particular website, it sets it as (not set).

In line with that, it is good to note that it is possible for Google.com to come through as a Referring Website when by all rights it should be coming from a search engine. This occurs when someone comes to your website from Google, but not from a SERP (Search Engine Results Page). For example if you use iGoogle for your RSS feeds, and someone clicks thru from that to read your blog post, that is a Google.com referral.

So how can you Minimise the Amount of Times (not set) Appears?

The easiest way is to make sure if you are running any campaigns (PPC, email marketing, social media, etc) to make sure your links are being tagged correctly. Stay tuned for a future post on how to do that.

Other than that? Analytics data collection is not perfect, and we all know that. So unfortunately we just have to deal with these little bumps. In reality it should only be an extremely small subset of your data. If it is accounting for more than 20%, its time to dig deeper into your Analytics installation for some underlying problems.