Google Instant and Instant Preview

You may have noticed some changes in traffic on your site while looking through your Google Analytics data. In particular, impressions may go up, even if traffic to your site does not. This is likely due to some changes Google made to how its search works by rolling out the Google Instant feature. To distill the data from Google:

From the Google Analytics blog (Google Instant and Google Analytics):

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.

From the Google Webmaster Central blog (Google Instant: Impact on Search queries):

With Google Instant, you may notice an increase in impressions because your site will appear in search results as users type. [...] It’s likely that your site will still see impressions for queries like [hotels in santa cruz], but because Instant is helping the user find results faster, your site may see an increase in impressions for shorter terms as well.

From the Google Inside AdWords blog (Google Instant: A More Innovative Approach to Search):

[...] Google Instant changes the way we think about impressions. With Google Instant, an impression is counted if a user takes an action to choose a query (for example, presses the Enter key or clicks the Search button), clicks a link on the results page, or stops typing for three or more seconds.

You may also notice while looking for your site in Google that Google now provides a screen shot preview of your page with the keywords being searched highlighted in the image. If for any reason you don't want your site or a page on your site to be presented as a screen capture in the search results (although we recommend that you do), you may add a "nosnippet" meta tag to your site. Google also excludes pages that are listed as non-indexable in your robots.txt file.

For more information I recommend reading through the following two posts (by me, but they have links to other sources):

• Google Instant and SEO/SEM, September 13, 2010
• Google Instant Preview Overview, November 15, 2010

As always, if you have any questions, please reach out to us. We have staff certified in Google Analytics who can answer your questions.