Google+ traffic soars: 66 percent increase in nine months
Traffic analytics site ComScore has revealed a large increase in visits to Google+. According to ComScore, the number of unique visitors to the social network has increased by 66 percent over the last nine months …
Context & Ripple Effects
Google+'s first year was a story of whiplash numbers: within weeks of launch, trackers logged both falling overall visits and a single-week 1269% traffic spike in September 2011, leaving analysts unsure whether the network had real momentum or just launch-curious drive-bys.
The trajectory steadied from there — Google itself claimed 62 million users by December 2011 — and this ComScore reading matters because it is an independent measurement firm, not the company, confirming a 66% rise in unique visitors across nine months. The pickup's breadth (CNET, VentureBeat, Marketing Land and others all ran it on the day) shows how closely the ad and marketing world is watching whether Google+ can be sold to advertisers as a serious audience.
First-order effects
- Google gets third-party validation to counter the 'ghost town' narrative: ComScore's confirmed 66% nine-month gain gives its sales teams an audited audience figure to pitch against Facebook's self-reported counts.
Second-order effects
- Marketers and media planners now have a ComScore-tracked Google+ number to put in media plans, forcing Facebook and Twitter to compete on independently measured engagement rather than headline registration figures.
Third-order effects
- If independent analytics firms keep becoming the referee for social-platform momentum, the competitive battle shifts from user-count announcements to whose numbers survive third-party audit — a dynamic ComScore has shaped before, from cleaning bogus searches out of search share in 2010 to defending video metrics against Quantcast in 2008.
The trend: Social-network competition is increasingly adjudicated by third-party measurement firms, whose audited traffic figures are displacing platforms' own self-reported growth claims as the currency advertisers trust.