The recently announced Google Instant is quick, slick, and impressive, but could spell trouble for website traffic analysts. Google has long-offered suggestions for search terms, but never anywhere close to the current speed. More importantly, suggested results were never displayed without an ‘enter’ key stroke or click by the user. Today, search results are being fed without this step. So what does this mean for the website traffic stats for your business?
The biggest change is that for many, web statistics are bound to show a spike of impressions. This is especially true for larger brands that are more commonly searched. An impression occurs whenever a site address is displayed to the user by that user pressing enter after a search query, clicking a suggested search query, or now when the user stops typing and the top suggested search results are displayed for over 3 seconds. Your click-through rate (CTR) is the number of impressions divided by the number of clicks, and is a key metric tracked by marketers. A sudden increase in impressions with no other changes can drive down your CTR dramatically. It’s the latest thing that marketers and web statistic analysts have to worry about.
The significance is that if you’re like me and stop in the middle of a query to think about the next word, or how to spell the word, or even if you’re a very slow typist, high ranking, high traffic sites are going to be falsely served impressions. This trend can translate for local and regional businesses as well, but likely to smaller extremes. Ultimately web stat analysts need to be prepared for higher impressions with lower CTR and not be too quick to throw out their keywords.
Since the new feature immediately pulls results as soon as you begin typing, I was interested to see what Google suggested if I type a single letter as it would offer insight to how they are suggesting results. I recorded the top suggestion for each single letter and my results came up as follows:
A: Amazon
B: Burlington Free Press
C: Craigslist
D: Dartmouth Coach
E: Ebay
F: Facebook
G: Gmail
H: Hulu
I: IMDB
J: Jet Blue
K: Kmart
L: Lowes
M: Mapquest
N: Netflix
O: Orbitz
P: Pandora
Q: Quotes
R: Rutland Herald
S: Sears
T: Target
U: UPS
V: Vermont
W: Weather
X: Xbox
Y: Yahoo
Z: Zappos
True to Google form, other colleagues do not get the same results as I. To a degree, Google is clearly pulling data from web history, previous searches, and personal internet behavior. However, not all of the data is directly related to history as I don’t know what Darmouth Coach is, don’t tend to shop at Sears or Target, and have never visited Kmart or Zappos.
Interestingly enough, 24 of the 26 letters suggested a brand first and 21 of these are national or international brands. The national to local brand contrast tells us a lot about the weight Google places on national over local business as well as consumer searching practices. One would wonder if a similar proportion of local to national/international brands would be found at other locations than Burlington, VT. What results does Google serve you? Are you surprised by how much Google remembers about you?
