Google Image traffic - learning what was searched

[Northstar]

Does anyone know if there is a way to tell what images from your site are being fetched by google? I'm getting tons of google images traffic to my blog but have no idea what images are being searched.

[Receptional Andy]

The key to this is extracting the data from the referrer information. An example image search referrer is:

http://images.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://www.example.com/example.jpg&imgrefurl=http://www.example.com/&prev=/images%3Fq%3Dexample+image

The keyword the visitors used is in bold. Additionally, you can see the image they found, and the page containing the image. It's a bit messy, since the information is 'url encoded' (hence the percentage symbols - an equals symbol becomes %3D, for instance).

I've found that few web analytics packages extract this information, so if you need to aggregate it, you may need a bit of configuration of your software.