Renegade Search

The good news about Google Instant is that it will have no effect on Google Analytics. Query strings will be passed from the search engine to site owners' Analytics accounts without any adjustments necessary. It's a seamless transition.

The bad news about Google Instant is that it will have no effect on Google Analytics. Query strings will be passed from the search engine to site owners' Analytics accounts without any adjustments necessary. It's an invisible change.

We've already discussed the complications that Instant might have for AdWords users (there are many). And in our first post in this series, we argued that Google Instant's effects on traffic will be indirect, yet significant. Over time, these effects should become more clear, but it's going to take a little bit of creativity and some monitoring on the part of site owners to understand what's happening.

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Because Google Instant seems like such a radical departure from previous search paradigms, many observers have been reacting with confusion on how or what has changed. In our first post in this series, we looked at Google Instant and SEO rankings and  concluded that the ranking algorithms and indexing modules haven't changed (even if users will interact with them differently). That post suggested a simple point: although Google Instant appears to change everything, it only changes some things.

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Yesterday on this blog, we discussed the effects of Google Instant on SEO. Switching gears, I wanted to put down a few ideas about how the new interface might effect the PPC world. Since Instant is so new, the long-term PPC effects have yet to be seen. That being said, I think it's clear that the following areas of PPC may be affected by the changes:

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Yesterday, Google held its much-hyped press event unveiling Google Instant at the Museum of Modern Art in San Francisco. Featuring pandering to the arts crowd, an exposition on the history of information retrieval, the most awesomely-named Googler ever, and even product demonstrations, the event raises a ton of questions for SEOs. Most importantly, many SEOs are wondering probably wondering how the new AJAX-based interface will effect rankings, PPC, and local search results. We've already seeing the obligatory "SEO is dead!" linkbait being put out there, but the fact of the matter is that the new interface shouldn't really change the process of SEO at all.

Technically, the updates should have no immediate effect on rankings. Google Instant is really nothing more than an updated user interface. As such, it is not (directly) related to any indexing or ranking algorithms. If your site ranks well for important keywords with instant search disabled, you shouldn't see much of a change with it enabled. At DTC, we've been doing some informal tests comparing the two and haven't seen any differences yet.

We'd love to be able to leave it at that. But this is Google we're talking about, so of course the nuances are way more complicated...

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