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How to Block Google Image Traffic from your Analytics


Last time I talked about how image alt tags affect your traffic, and mentioned that you can block traffic from image searches through your analytics.

I would suggest blocking the image search domain only if you aren’t recieving qualified traffic, which would apply for almost every industry.  However, there may be some searches you wouldn’t want to block.  For example, if you run a destination wedding service and many customers find you by image searching for destination weddings, you might want to keep track of who finds you image searching.  (You could set up a special goal tracking this data.)

edit accountIn order to block Image search engines, simply go to your Analytics Settings Dashboard and click “edit”.

Scroll down and choose the “add filter” button in the Filter section.add google analytics filterThen simply enter the Filter information – a name that you’ll recognize, the filter type (from domain), and finally the domain (Google Images, in this case).

google images filterNicki Hicks
Tracking Quality Traffic

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This entry was posted on Monday, March 30th, 2009 at 11:21 am and is filed under Analytics, Google. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

  • http://www.synchronium.net Synchronium

    I don’t know about you, but I get image traffic from image searches in multiple languages. It might be a better idea to block images.google.X

    Not sure what the right syntax is for that, but you get the idea.

  • http://www.conference-coordinator.com Conference Planner

    hmm, its a bit of a issue in some ways.

    On our own site we get spikes now and again when we add certian images. We label them correctly and so they get found. Trouble is this traffic is quite high and actually pushes the bounce rates up to alarming levels.

    so what to do?

    I think it comes down to what Big G does with bounce rates and whether it has the sense to realise that many times a high bounce rate is a very good thing.

    The best example of that would be dictionary websites right? how do I spell a word, dictionary search, ahh, thanks. bounce. How is that bad? its the opposite of course.

    The other thing is whether google will seperate the images bounce rates from the rest of your landing page traffic and set different rules for each. My targeted search traffic for a page here is 26% bounce, image search is 96% bounce with 3 times the traffic.

    Higher traffic means higher potential advertising and branding space also.

    Arghhhh

    Basically we need Google to tell us is best in these sitautions and if,how, why and when it is using bounce rates information

  • http://www.flyte.biz Nicki

    I think it really depends on your business model: if you have an ecommerce site, and image searches are drastically skewing your analytics, it might be worth blocking images.google.

    Or, like you said, look at the traffic from image searches separately and take it for what it’s worth!


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