While traffic stats can be a tricky thing, one thing they’re good for is to judge growth trends. According to a new report by web traffic analyst Compete, Google+ saw impressive growth towards the end of 2011.
Google’s social network, which has come under fire since its heavy integration in Google’s main product, search, saw nearly half as many unique visitors as Twitter did in December of 2011.
Compete says that Twitter had 40,411,065 unique visitors during that month, and Google+ had an impressive 20M during the same time-frame.
After seeing a slight dip in visitors in October of last year, it looks like Google+righted the ship and had a strong end of the year, which is good news for Google since it’s clearly putting all of its social eggs into the Google+ basket.
The below chart shows the traffic statistics for Google+ since Compete started tracking them, which was as soon as the site became public:
In addition to Google+ becoming more popular as a social destination, Compete shares that its +1 feature which is embedded on a variety of blogs and other external sites saw a rise in popularity as well. To grab those numbers, Compete tracked the subdomain for the +1 button, which is http://plusone.google.com, and saw over 40M uniques in December 2011 (the feature was only widely released in November):
While we should all take these numbers with a grain of salt, its clear that Google+ grabbed a solid userbase and continues to trend upwards in popularity when it comes to monthly unique visitors. While the site is nowhere near the traffic that Facebook sees on a daily basis, the company will definitely continue to push the product forward and we’ll be watching.
COMMENTARY: I have been an avid Google+ member since Google invited me to join Google+ when it was still in beta, and am now an avid fan. Love the simple and minimalist user interface, Circles and Hangouts features and free games, and it drives a lot of traffic to my blog. Thank you very much.
I have been covering Google+ since it was announced that they had hit 30 million users, then 40 million users. Google+ follower Paul Allen reported that Google+ had hit 62 million users on December 29, 2011 and I could not have been happier. A lot of social media experts had written its epitaph. In a blog post dated January 21, 2012, Google CEO Larry page had announced that Google+ had reached 90 million, and I was absolutely overjoyed because this put any doubts about Google+ to rest. In a blog article dated February 7, 2012, Mr. Allen reported that Google+ had reached the 100 million users mark on February 1, 2012, the very day that Facebook filed its IPO.
I am absolutely ecstatic that Google+ has logged 20 million unique visitors in December 2011. I have a feeling that this number will double if Google+ can maintain a 50-50 ratio of unique visitor to total registered users. When compared to Twitter's 40 million unique monthly visitors, that's quite impressive when you consider that Twitter had 350 million users at the end of December 2011. That's quite a differernce in participation.
Not bad for a "little" social network as Mark Zuckerberg referred to it when it was first launched on June 29, 2011.
Courtesy of an article dated February 8, 2011 appearing in TheNextWeb
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