Google Will Update Referral Source to Show Image Traffic

Written by Kristina Azarenko

Choose the Service You Need

Yesterday Google announced that it is going to update the way we see traffic from Google images to our websites. The update will be rolling out in the next months which is definitely good news!

What’s Changing

Currently all the traffic which is coming from Google search and Google image search is shown under Google.com in Google Analytics:

google analytics google referrals

Once the update is live I assume will be able to see something like this in GA reports:

google analytics google images referral

Note: Google Search Console does give you the info on traffic from Google Images now:

google search console image source

How to Optimize Your Images

There are some easy steps that are surprisingly neglected by many website owners. In order to get maximum exposure from Google image search you should:

  • name your images for people and search engines (i.e. instead of iyu70.png use google-analytics-traffic-sources.png)
  • give titles to your images
  • add keyword optimized alt tags
  • create an xml sitemap for your images
  • optimize and compress images

So let’s welcome this change and see how it will look like!

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