The New Google Images (And why you’re probably not tracking it properly)

The new Google Images has finally been rolled out to the UK and it’s causing a mild buzz.

The general consensus seems to be that it’s a big improvement on the old one and not too disimilar from Bing.

One key difference is that you can’t actually tell which site you’re about to visit before you click an image. This doesn’t seem to be a problem for users but some publishers have expressed concerns that they might get less traffic as a result.

It’s also possible to view vastly more images on a single page than previously so it could drive more visits to sites that previously ranked lower.

How do you measure traffic from Google Images?

It’s quite likely that the vast majority of site owners don’t have a clue how much traffic is driven to their site from Google Images or if the traffic is good quality or not. The reason is because most analytics packages are just not set up to track Google Images – and that includes Google Analytics.

Some people might believe it as simple as finding images.google.com in the list of referring sources but the one thing this doesn’t tell about is Google Images. That’s because all Google Images are opened in a frameset, the URL of which doesn’t always contain the sub-domain images.google.com. In fact it’s possible to conduct a web search on images.google.com just by changing the search type in the left hand menu.

Google has been increasingly redirecting users away from images.google.com and .co.uk subdomains so if you trend this data over time you’ll probably see a big decline.

The only way to track traffic from Google Images is to look at the referring URL which is hidden in most analytics packages. Any referring URLs to your site  from Google containing the string ‘imgres’ or ‘imglanding’ are Google Image referrals.

You can set up a custom Google Analytics profile to detect this parameter and relabel the source to Google Images using the filter settings below. We’ll be covering this in more detail in a later post where we show you a fully customised profile just to track all the facets of Google search.

The profile will start collecting the data from the moment it is set up so it’s too late to do this to analyse the impact of the new Google Images but worth doing as you may be a little bit suprised.

The Results

  1. The first thing we found is that the quality of Google Images can actually be very good. For one of our larger clients, the quality of traffic from Google Images was actually higher than Google Web searches in terms of engagement. This was a surprise as we’d always believed the myth that traffic from Google Images is poor.
  2. For the clients we reviewed, there was no significant change in the amount of traffic they received from Google Images after the new version was launched. If anything you might expect traffic to go up during the initial excitement of the launch but it would be unusual to see a decline.
  3. The quality of the traffic appears to have increased since the update. For the clients we looked at, time on site and pages per visit went up and bounce rate reduced by a significant margin. We don’t have any sensible reasons why this has happened but the results are undeniable. You can see the effect of the new Images being rolled out to Google.com a week and a half before Google.co.uk.

Conclusions

Once you’re tracking Google Images properly, you might be surprised by the contribution and quality of traffic. It’s probably too late to tell if you’ve benefited or lost out from this update but it seems like this should have been a positive effect for most people.

Posted on August 2, 2010 at 6:26 pm by chris · Permalink
In: Analytics, Google, Natural search

2 Responses

Subscribe to comments via RSS

  1. Written by Ani Lopez
    on September 10, 2010 at 5:57 pm
    Reply · Permalink

    Hi, I have not found more than 12.28% of total traffic coming from Google Images
    Stats here http://dynamical.biz/blog/seo-technical/traffic-from-images-search-engines-29.html

    any higher values?

    • Written by chris
      on September 11, 2010 at 5:04 pm
      Reply · Permalink

      That’s massive. I’ve checked a couple of our largest clients and they are getting 3% and 6% of total visits from Google images. Do you see any potential issues with sampled data from segmentation rather than profile filters?

      Your URL patterns are slightly different to ours.

      ^(/imgres|/images/view|/images/search) vs. (\/imgres|\/imglanding)

Subscribe to comments via RSS

Leave a Reply