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I've been seeing posts and forum complaints that Google Analytics has shown tremendous drops in search referrals from Google Image Search. To make a long story short, Google Analytics seemed to have switched how they report Google Image search traffic, moving it from the referrals report and into the organic search report.
There are reports at WebmasterWorld (see July 26th) and Google Analytics Help forums about this.
As reported by Gabs and AJ Kohn, it is simply a matter of Google moving the traffic under the search engine report.
Here is a graph from Gabs:
I was able to verify this in several of my sites that I track.
Google, I do not believe, has any word about this change, so I can see why people freaked out when they saw this.
Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld and Google Analytics Help.
Comments:
Black Seo Guy
07/28/2011 01:17 pm
Maybe they are really talking a closer look at images these days as a regular search. I know I get lots of traffic form imagines I never thought I would. "Black Seo Guy "Signing Off"
AJ Kohn
07/28/2011 04:07 pm
I'm still hoping to get some sort of confirmation from Google Analytics as to the change and whether they plan to roll out a subsequent update that will allow users to split text based and image based search traffic.
imnotadoctor
07/28/2011 04:16 pm
Hopefully they will add a feature to filter these results.
MB
07/28/2011 04:19 pm
Google also changed the way they determine paid search ads quality on Image search. I've seen traffic decrease significantly since the change late in May. They basically want your ads to be more and as relevant as possible.
T_SEO
08/09/2011 09:56 am
Hmm, whilst I can see a drop in referrals from Google's image search, I don't see a corresponding increase in organic traffic - anyone else in a similar position?...
Google Analytics
12/31/2012 02:20 pm
This situation for switching the Google Analytics searches to an images. I think this is just very easy to do for the people that is an expert of using the tool. Google images can probably increase search visibility on Google too.
William Drummond
02/28/2013 06:03 pm
Simply put looking at my server logs and not just analytics I saw my bandwidth go up and the amount of visitors and page views go down. In plain terms more images shown on google without people actually visiting my site