Preliminary Results on Instant are In

I've read up on some of the initial impacts that paid search has been seeing in the first few weeks of Google Instant. SEO results will still take some time. For the full story, see a Search Engine Land newsletter that went out this week. The high level is below:

1. Slight jump in impressions, but no indication yet of the mass amounts of impression increases that had been expected.

2. No shift in paid positions 1 through 3 in terms of impressions, however, reported higher conversions were seen. The hypothesis is that with instant on, users had more time to fully read the paid results, and therefore accurately make purchasing decisions, increasing conversions.

3. Low positioned paid results experienced a 20% decline in traffic.

4. More head terms were seen among searches.

5. Bidding on competitive domains or trademarks fell off the map. This could indicate a decrease in Quality Score, which had been anticipated as a result of Instant.

6. "Short Typing" -- Accidentally hitting enter when the user sees the desired result appear half way and hitting enter. Example: "Dis" completes as "Dis"ney. The user hits enter after typing Dis but sees "ney" in grey. The search results populate for "Dis" including the stock ticker instead of for Disney. This may mean advertisers may need to start bidding on partial terms.