Image credit: Sparkto

[kexej28769@nongnue]

But I know what you’re thinking. Image SEO drives few to no sessions, let alone conversions. Why should I invest my limited resources in visual marketing?

Because humans are visual creatures. And now, so are mobile phones - with large screens, multiple cameras, and strong depth perception.

Advances in computer vision have sparked a renaissance in visual marketing. Just look at visual search leader Pinterest, which says that 55% of its users shop on the platform. How well do those users belize number data ? Heap Analytics data shows that at shopping cart sizes under $199, image-based Pinterest ads have an 8.5% conversion rate. To put that in context, that’s behind Google’s 12.3% but ahead of Facebook’s 7.2%.

Not only can visual search drive significant conversions online, image recognition is also driving digitalization and monetization in the real world.

The rise of visual search on Google
Traditionally, image search worked like this: Google took a text-based query and tried to find the best visual match based on metadata, markups, and surrounding copy.

But for several years now, the image itself can also serve as a search query. Google can search for images with images. It's called visual search.

Google has been quietly adding advanced image recognition capabilities to mobile Google Images over the past few years, focusing on the fashion industry as a test case for commercial opportunities (though the functionality could be applied to automotive, travel, food, and many other industries). As updates are planned, you can see clear stepping stone technologies building on the theme of visual search.