Google Instant and Google Analytics
Wednesday, September 08, 2010 | 9:44 AM
Labels: Announcements, Related Products
Today, we announced the launch of Google Instant, a new Google.com interface that shows relevant results while the user types. This exciting new search interface applies to both search results and related ads. We expect Google Instant will help users find what they’re looking for faster. With this change, you might notice some fluctuations in AdWords impression volume and in the distribution of organic keywords. For example, you may find that certain keywords receive significantly more or fewer impressions moving forward.
To read more about how this change affects AdWords advertisers, please visit the Inside AdWords Blog. Users of Webmaster Tools should also see their post about Google Instant.
Update at 5:10pm PST: Clarified that you may see a change in the distribution of traffic of organic keywords.
14 comments:
Christopher Evans said...
We have written a blog post which explains how to track the original search queries alongside the suggested search queries in Google Analytics.
http://blog.semetrical.com/how-to-track-google-instant-in-google-analytics/
2:53 PM
Micha said...
Exciting stuff, instant search results. Google Analytics has not changed yet but will definitely show different results.
I have one concern though. People are more likely to "search" for terms that Google suggests instead of using their own terms. Won't this steer people towards certain search terms? This also brings up the following question: How does a term qualify to become a "suggested term"? Based on semantics or popularity? I hope the Google team is able to answer these questions.
12:38 AM
Ramkumar said...
I see a Mobile visitor segment under visitors when you get into the page where you can create custom segments.
Is this an easier way to create segment than choosing every mobile operating system?
More on this is at http://www.seolion.com/google-analytics-advanced-segment-for-mobile-device-traffic/
1:55 AM
Laurie said...
Same question - semantics or popularity? Not content or IBLs?
6:33 AM
Fking said...
Yes i would also like to know how the suggested terms are formed.
Also i noticed that the suggestions are significantly different from the ones of the old version.
Watching the presentation, i got the impression that it's by popularity, but if that's true what was the factor before?
7:17 AM
Brandon said...
This might be a long shot... but if Google instant increases the number of impressions on my Adwords ads (and potentially lowering my clicks), does that mean my quality score could drop?
8:01 AM
bwin said...
I can see more long tail and unique keywords visits than ever before (4 years comparison data). Before Google instant (4500000 visits from 2300 000 keywords) After google instant (4350000 from 3560000) which mean more relevancy and lower bounce rate and increase in direct ads revenue planning >)
11:06 AM
Chad said...
Aren't those 0.3 second per keystroke typers busy looking at the keys? Sorry Google I think you missed the mark on this one. Just because we can innovate doesn't automatically mean we should.
5:01 PM
SakBalam said...
Actually it appears that Instant may decrease the democratic nature of the organic results. Simply type in "batteries" for example... once you get to "batter" you'll see that "battery" is the 1st suggestion and "batteries plus" is 2nd.
Once the "i" is added to clarify that the term is not "battery" and that it will logically be "batteries" G removes "battery" and "batteries" from the suggestions and what's suggested are websites that sell batteries.
It shows that G knows that the search term would be "batteries" as it presents websites that sell batteries and that rank for that term. 2. It doesn't provide the term "batteries" as a search suggestion so that if someone will not continue through with their search and opt for the suggestion (which is supposed to be non-biased) then they would go to a website and not a SERP with 10 options per page about "batteries".
Google wants to have its cake and eat it too a bit here. 1. Are they going to say that "batteries plus", "batteries.com" and "batteries america" are more relevant and more searched/popular terms than the keyword "batteries" itself?
Though those sites may come up first for the term Google is attempting to remove the option for someone to see the SERPs and browse the results. Instead they're simply getting suggested the 1st or top 3 results. Though the 1st or top 3 do receive more traffic from a search they are still part of 10 results per page and those pages still provide democratic results. This potentially signals the beginning of the end of the democratic nature of the SERPs.
It appears that they're basing the suggestions off of what the search term likely would be and then are taking top results from those terms and placing them in as suggestions. They're not providing similar search terms only which would be logical since people are likely searching based on terms and terms should have priority over sites. By placing in sites as suggestions G is removing similarly spelled or relevant alternate/related terms. Another fact appears that is even more disturbing... that if you type "battery" the top suggested is "BatteriesPlus.com" while the #1 organic result (for me) is "Wikipedia". This means that G is pushing the top commerce result rather than the top result which is an "informative" result and is obviously considered more relevant than "batteriesplus" which is the 2nd organic result. Actually on my Instant suggestions there are at least 4 out of 5 sites that are commerce sites when the informative sites that are above many of them are not suggested.
This signals a shift of focus in the organics towards commerce sites and away from information.
As for SEO being dead, it's the contrary. You still have some actual "terms" being suggested and once a term is picked it will be based on the organic aspects that SEO caters to. As for the suggested "sites" they appear to be from the top 3 so it only means that SEO is even more important to get someone to the top 3 (1 even more importantly) so that they will appear in the suggestions.
This will separate the milk from the cream of SEOs as SEO's are more challenged to provide solutions for the more long-tail optimization of MayDay and these new changes with Instant. I believe that this will make SEOs go after more specific terms, especially those that appear in the suggestions than they would have before. This could adversely lead to targeting terms and content that the sites they're optimizing for wouldn't have targeted otherwise. The adversity would be in the form of Google getting more competition for non-related keywords and a clouding of the results with sites that are optimized versus those that are not that may have been better results.
It's going to be interesting.
6:33 PM
SakBalam said...
6:46 PM
SakBalam said...
9:15 PM
unpure said...
Er, for the most part I don't think so, Chad...
I'm sure some people would be looking at the keys, but anyone who can type properly would hardly be looking at the keyboard while they were doing it so they could see whether they'd misspelled anything or whatever... :D
On the contrary, I think that if we can then by all means we should innovate...
I'd also like to hear how the suggested terms are formed, is it page or search semantics or "a robot" (some sort of text processing magick that looks at what other keywords might be relevant based on a super-extended thesaurus and language patterns, etc)?
10:03 AM
SakBalam said...
Sorry, I posted the same thing 3 times... my computer was doing the Curly Shuffle :)
10:23 AM
Neeraj Srivastava said...
Well....its really cool feature added to google search...but its doing bad for me as I am loosing traffic for my sites.... :-(
10:21 AM
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