A month ago, Google announced they are changing the referrer URL for Google Image search so you can better track image search from Google Images traffic to your site. Google Analytics announced how that will appear in Google Analytics and I do see some traces of that showing up in Google Analytics now.
I covered this last night at Search Engine Land and the most interesting part to me is that the Google announcement about this Analytics change works when you go to that URL only when you add the ?utm_source=feedburner to the end of the URL - for example this works and this does not work.
In any event, this is how you'd see the new Google Image Search traffic from Google Images:
This does not seem to be rolled out yet but I am seeing traces of this in my analytics of this new referrer URL. I suspect Google has been testing this a bit and will be rolling it out fully.
Google said "Soon, when the Google Images team makes their changes to the referral source URL, there will be a new Source line item for image search reflected in Google Analytics which will display as ‘google images’ in the Source report and ‘google images / organic’ in the Source / Medium report within Analytics."
Here is a screen shot from one big image search SEO who sees it also:
sorry, I have to correkt me: Seems that it is live, but ... WTF! pic.twitter.com/jH4wJXAdEN
— Martin Missfeldt (@Missfeldt) August 21, 2018
Google also said that if you have filters set up, make sure to adjust those filters. "If you do have special filters, custom channel groupings, or reports based on this data, then you will want to make updates as needed to capture the new Source parameter in your custom settings," Google wrote.
Forum discussion at Twitter.
