Google Instant to Be Major Impact on Analytics

[Brett_Tabke]

Other thread: [webmasterworld.com...]

Webmasters, you may notice some changes in you Search queries data due to the launch of Google Instant. With Google Instant, the page updates dynamically to show results for the top completion of what the user has typed, so this means people could be seeing and visiting your website much faster than before, and often without clicking the search button or hitting “enter.”

With Google Instant, you may notice an increase in impressions because your site will appear in search results as users type.

[izurl.com...]

[Yippee2]

The Instant forces the suggestion drop down in a manner different than before. Before as I typed the suggestion box dropped over the top sponsored link. Assuming of course I was typing from a previous search instead of the homepage.

Now the suggestion box forces everything on the page down making the top sponsored link box to be center stage in effect increasing the ad click through. It was said before that even when the organic results are off, the ads are spot on. This is all about G making money, they have become comfortable with the marketshare they have and now are cashing in at the highest level possible.

[mrguy]

It's also not working in Safari.

[Bewenched]

I'm not liking it at all.

[dickbaker]

It's working in Safari for me, mrguy.

[karter]

whats the point, to me all that will happen is that the first item people see will be clicked more often,

i guess that means adwords box :)

[Lame_Wolf]

Designed to work in IE8 only, not lower versions.

That's good. Up to 20% of my visitor use IE6. And I do too :)

[buckworks]

actually gets results sent for "g".

It would make more sense to me if they waited until the user had typed in more than one letter rather than starting the feature after just one keystroke.

What I'm seeing as a user is a lot of free branding exposure being handed out to sites that are already well known. The rich get richer.

I haven't figured out yet how to respond as an SEO ...

[mrguy]

It's working in Safari for me, mrguy.

Weird... It's not working on my PC version of Safari or my iPad.

[tedster]

Google does measure your connection speed and won't serve Instant if it's too slow - could that be it?

[tedster]

From what I can see, this code doesn't activate Firefox pre-fetch. Can anyone else confirm?

[Eurydice]

On a conf call with the UK this morning, it wasn't working for them (UK). Not sure why. I think Google is fine-tuning and testing. It may be several days before we have a stable tool.

One client has 30m monthly visitors; we're going to watch and compare organic traffic in Google, Bing, and Yahoo to see if gInstant has an effect.

[tfanelli]

Has anyone noticed auto completion favoring longer search phases? If this is true could this impact long tail volume.

[tedster]

Here's an analytics oddity that's turning up for me. The keywords in the referrer string (and in the URL for the SERP) now include any final word fragment that was in the search box when a click is made -- even if those extra letters did not change the Google Instant SERP.

So it looks like you're ranking on some very odd phrases, but the last "word" is not really part of the search term. Instead, search suggestions just stopped updating and the user spotted a link they wanted to click.

[mkassets]

It's probably too early to draw conclusions about the traffic impact on the organic serps, but here are some observations so far

- a website of mine, normally getting around a 1M pageviews per month from a few high volume keywords for which it ranks as #5-#10, takes a hit of about 20% in traffic. That's not surprising I guess ...

- another website of mine, which dominates its niche with a lot of #1-#2 rankings across the wide spectrum of keywords is actually unaffected and may be even showing some increase of 5%-10% but it is too early to tell if this increase is not a random fluctuation

Ranking for a broad range of keywords may become more important now. Intuitively, Google Instant favors large sites - the big will become bigger, and the small ... Unfortunate change in this perspective ...

[dudibob]

I'm in the UK and was getting the instant results on .com only, not the .co.uk version and I can't remember if I was logged in or not. However I'm not getting it in the office on either version of Google.

[nomis5]

i'm in the UK as well. It seems that if you are logged in, Instant is the default. If you are not logged in Instant won't work.

I think Instant will be the default in the UK around mid next week.

[filbiz]

Yeah it looks good at first but after some playing around I feel like an idiot. Words are being shoved on my mouth as I type and the drop downs are not relevant to what I'm going to type. It's like the computer is telling me what to do.

[tedster]

This thread was intended to discuss Google Instant's impact on the way Analytics works, but it has become a second and parallel thread attracting only general comments rather than Analytics insights. For that reason I'm asking people to take any general comments about Instant to the main thread [webmasterworld.com...]

If any one does have an observation about the impact of Google Instant on how Analytics works, this is the place. It may be a little early for firm conclusions, but please share your initial observations on how Analytics is impacted.

It looks to me like the referrer data is still flowing, and indeed there may be a few extra layers of intelligence to be cherry-picked from the full referrer.

[wallarookiller]

Seems like it may be good if you rank for long tail searches. You type in widgets and wam your looking at "widgets for whatever". Not sure if this is going to impact me either way looking at my stats. Should be interesting in coming months.

[Eurydice]

One of our clients has 10 millions visitors per month. We looked carefully at the Google organic search traffic data: Google Instant has no impact so far, either positive or negative.

We will continue to watch this.

[setzer]

Same here. I have not seen any fluctuation in search traffic on a site with 1 million visits a month.