I have been in several situations with my clients where I needed to see the traffic coming from Google Image Search. This, of course, applies to clients with e-commerce websites and visually nice products. The thing is, I looked and looked, and I couldn’t find any help in the Analytics support section regarding tracking image traffic.
Reading here and there I got different opinions, some expert said it wasn’t possible, some others said that it only could be done through Google Webmaster Tools, some others gave an incredibly complicated way of doing it using Javascript functions.
Until one day, after more and more searching the web, I found a couple of posts with exactly the answer to my prayers! Find below.
[tweetable alt=””]Finding Google Image traffic through Referal Paths[/tweetable]:
Acquisition / All Traffic / Referrals
Once there, click into Google.com, and you will see the referral paths. If the referral paths is “imgres”, “mgres”, “images” or “imagedetail”, that is the number you want.
Once you have this you can select Landing Page as a secondary dimension, to have an idea of what landing pages contain the images that are being clicked through from Google Image Search. (Sorry for the blur, client confidentiality!)
This is pretty useless if you have pages with 20 images in each, but most of the websites will have one obvious image (that of course will have the correspondent optimised alt text, file name, etc..) that you can recognise as the one driving traffic.
The problem is that you might have referrals from more than one “google”, and this means you will need to go one by one opening and counting all the different referral paths with images in google.de, google.fr, google.co.uk and so on.
I found this segment in Search Engine Watch, and it has been shared by John Doherty, the Office Lead at Distilled NYC. John has written loads for MOZ and has lots of interesting articles related to GA and SEO in general, have a look!
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