A few weeks back I wrote a post about how your Google AdWords budget may yield less results because of Google’s new “Google Instant” product and how it may result in more ads being shown which aren’t necessarily relevant.

Well it was recently reported by Barry Shwartz at Search Engine Land that Google Analytics Data has been skewed recently due to Google Instant page previews. While this isn’t the same thing, it does demonstrate that Google Instant may be causing false positives for analytics results, I wonder how it is affecting Google AdWords, and whether it really is lowering Quality Scores and raising the price that advertisers have to pay for a particular search term.

According to Barry, “It appears that in some cases Google will conduct an on-demand fetch of your page to dynamically create an Instant Preview. The on-demand fetch happens when a searcher places his mouse over the search result on Google and the image preview comes up. Some analytics tools, including Google Analytics, may consider that a visit, because Google Instant Preview is actually visiting the page in real-time to get that on-demand Instant Preview.”

While I want to believe that Google is a “good company” and lives by their motto of “Don’t be Evil” one has to also realize at the end of the day they are still a company, and need to protect their bottom line. Hopefully this is simply a temporary bug that they will have fixed in the next few days.