My site receives hundreds of visitors a day from Google Images and I was just wondering, is this quality traffic? Do image searchers actually read content on a site. Looking at my traffic statistics, all they do is stay on that same page and leave. Does anyone know about the quality of traffic from image results?
generally it's not "quality traffic" but it's better than nothing. My images traffic is virtually nil because all of my sites pictures are only viewable when safe search is removed, so, if I were you, I'd be pleased with the traffic
In almost every case, anyone landing on your site via google image search will not load any page - they will just suck your bandwidth and move on. You can use Javascript to force them out of the Google frame and onto your site - don't expect them to read any articles or buy anything though. The thing with doing this, it can either be a positive or a negative depending on what you are trying to do. It will inflate your pageviews quite a lot, as they will try and hit back and it refreshes the page again. I used it on an adsense site and it really lowered my ctr and ecpm. It didn't lower my earnings though, just the inflated pageviews distorted my Adsense stats so I switched it back off. If you want to make your site look more popular, or are selling cpm ads, it might be worth using. The code for anyone who wants to try it: <script language="JavaScript" type="text/javascript"> if (top.location != self.location) top.location.replace(self.location); </script> Code (markup):
I think I'm just going to leave it as it is. I get unlimited bandwidth for no extra cost so I'm not really bothered about bandwidth. Thanks for your input guys.
Yeah, I wouldn't call it quality either, but hey you're still getting traffic from it, so that's an added bonus. It's always nice to get traffic from areas that you normally never get traffic.
The two sites I have owned always get traffic from images but not web search. I would much prefer it from web search, that way the traffic is high quality. When Bin Laden died, a page on my website had 30,000 pageviews, all from image search. How annoying?
The Google Images search results are laid out in a very clear way so the user can see straight away which image they are looking for and whether it is the right size for their application. To make the most of your Google Images rankings you need to make sure that your image is the best one on the page and that it stands out from all the others in some way.
my site is having serious problems down traffic, the article completely new, non-stick sanbox not understand why ?????
It's annoying really because people like me and you spend time writing quality content and all the traffic are after is the images. I think I need to work on ranking higher in web search!
it depends on the kind of site. we get lots and lots of Google Images traffic on several sites, and oftentimes it's quite good traffic (e.g. on wallpaper sites). so definitely worth optimizing for.
@Torafox. Yes that would be quality traffic for you guys then but my site is more like an encyclopedia with quite a lot of text. It's also a blog which delivers news to readers.
then it is less likely that Google Images traffic would be that good for you since the bounce rate is likely going to be high. just consider what you yourself would do if you searched for an image and clicked on it in G image search. most likely you'd just take a quick glance at it full-size and then leave again. only if the article around it has a lot of relation to the image - or if there are more similar images around - might an image searcher stay longer.
That's correct, my bounce rate is pretty high. I'm going to work on improving my traffic from web search over the next couple of months and weeks.
Image traffic does now at least show your page, but it's not really "quality" traffic. Terribly high bounce rates, and a lot of image leechers who want to steal your bandwidth.