Google Instant Pages vs. Analytics Software

[Dario]

Last week Google released Instant Pages for Chrome which tries to predict which search result a user will click and then pre-renders that page making it load instantly for the end user when clicked.

It looks pretty cool on video but there is a potential problem with this update and analytics software. If a user does not click on the search result that was predicted the page has loaded for nothing and the tracker may pick it up as a visitor even though the page was never actually displayed to the user.

The effect would be more traffic with lower % of new visitors and higher bounce rate.


Is anyone here seeing this?

[Cane Toad]

Ugh! Something weird is going on, but for me its been longer than that. In July and this month we bought some traffic and the provider seemed to be playing fairly, and I still think that they are playing fairly. The weird thing is that since I checked my hits by browser I am having an very unlikely amount of traffic via Chrome browsers. Something like 7 to 5 hits for Chrome vs 2 hits for the next two browsers combined. This has not changed since last week. Could they (Google) have been doing something like this sooner?

Side note: Has any one noted their data for Internet Explorer failing to include the source / medium for hits?

[smutnut]

Things are starting to get a little better for me. That's weird.

[Cane Toad]

Well the http:// version of my site did go up to a PR2.

[MP]

And the traffic keeps going up...

[Cane Toad]

Not the search traffic, its staying the same, but the returning traffic has been gradually growing.