The internet is abuzz today over reports that Google’s Instant Preview is “accidentally” firing off script-based analytics products and artificially inflating website visits, not to mention skewing page views, bounce rate, and more (see discussions at Search Engine Land, SEO Rountdable and on WebmasterWorld - or read more on Google Instant Preview). This is even happening in Google’s own Analytics application.

In case you’re not sure what I’m talking about, Google Instant Preview is the recent change Google made that gives you the ability to see a snapshot of a website that is returned with various search results. This snapshot not only shows the page you’d be visiting if you clicked the result, but can also concatenate the page and even highlight text on the returned page that matches your search term. It’s an interesting idea, but apparently one fraught with unforeseen consequences.

When is a Website Visit “Not” a Visit?

To be fair, the discussion isn’t saying that all Instant Previews are triggering “visits” to a page, but the fact that it does so AT ALL means that visitor results in script-based website analytics products can be skewed. If your site is in a heavily searched category, the impact can even be fairly significant. To make matters worse, script-based analytics products generally don’t separate search engine visits from other, more relevant, visits to a website. This makes the skewing of results even more significant.

There are other implications as well. For example, in the WebmasterWorld forum mentioned, the original poster details some strangeness that started in mid-October. Now, Google Instant Preview wasn’t released until a few weeks ago, but we, too, noticed changes in our traffic patterns in mid-October. Not only were visits impacted, but our Alexa ranking dropped as well (or rose, depending on how you look at it). The change in Alexa rank was noticed by others as well, including Alexa itself. Now, the use of Alexa as a viable monitor for traffic trends is a constant source of debate, but the mere fact that they saw issues themselves, and address those issues in a blog post, speaks volumes. Are these two items related? It’s hard to tell. What IS certain is that recent changes Google made are having ill effects for websites across the web.

How Does Web Log Analytics Software Solve This?

One source to alleviate some of the concerns, at least with regards to Google Instant Preview, is with web log analytics applications like our own SmarterStats product. Website log file analytics products like SmarterStats DO keep spider visits and “regular” visits separate, and report on them separately. That means, even if Google Instant Preview DOES fire off a “visit”, web log analyzers will report it as just another Spider visit, not as a potential customer visit. Sure, there is still the inflation of a number, but it’s a search engine visit versus a visit that could lead to a conversion on your website.

Looking at our own stats, I can see 2265 visits this week from Google’s Web Preview user agent (it’s “Mozilla/5.0 (en-us) AppleWebKit/525.13 (KHTML, like Gecko; Google Web Preview) Version/3.1 Safari/525.13” if you’re interested). That means that our traffic stats are off by 2265 visits. The next minor release of SmarterStats will have this information added to the bots file, so, moving forward, you’ll see true visits and page views, and the Google Instant Preview visits will display as actual spider and bot visits. Look for that release shortly. For their part, Google is saying that they will have a fix in place as well, but won’t give a timeframe for the release of that fix.

For more information on the differences between web site log analytics software and script-based log file analyzers, take a look at our whitepaper: SmarterStats vs. Google Analytics. If more information comes to light about this topic, we’ll be sure to let you know.

This post was written by Derek C., vice-president of marketing and communications for SmarterTools. If you liked this post, please consider subscribing to the SmarterTools Blog so you don’t miss an update.