How Popular is Google Image Search?

[WSI-SEO-Team]

Are there any stats on the volume of searches through Google's Image Search?  My assumption is that more users are turning to image search to shop but I haven't found any supporting data.  I know that click-throughs to site have fallen after Google's recent changes to the UI but still just interested in initial search volume.

[katemorris]

I can't say for certain about the volume increasing overall, but image search has changed tons. What I can do is point you to a GA hack that allows you to see if your traffic is coming from image or not.

http://moz.com/blog/decoding-googles-referral-string-or-how-i-survived-secure-search

[DennisSeymour]

We run multiple travel sites and food sites and it's pretty clear that images still bring in lots of traffic.

As for e-commerce, I will have to look at it later. Seems like a possibility as buyer tendencies are indeed changing nowadays

Oh, it does even more traffic for the celebrities/girls niches. And in many cases, more than actual SERP results.

[SEO5Team]

One of our clients in the travel vertical generates almost 20% of their traffic from Google Images. They post a lot of images on the site each tagged/optimized properly. Image search in our opinion should be a part of an overall SEO strategy for clients.

[Prospector-Plastics]

Unfortunately I am unaware of stats, however your question is timely. Just last night my fiance and I were searching for a specific kind of wedding shoes for her. After no luck with web searches, we turned to image search, found the right pair, clicked on the image which linked to an ecommerce page, and voila - we bought the shoes, the site made the sale.

I think both image and video search will gather momentum - seems like people are less inclined to read when in browse/shopping mode, but rather peruse images or watch videos.

Perhaps someone can chime in to inform if there is a way in analytics to determine what traffic is generated from image searches on Google (or other engines)?