Far more important than the sheer number of users, however, is the engagement of those users. For instance, while Buzz got pushed to nearly every Gmail user, most non-Google affiliated users told me (on Facebook, no less) that Buzz was a dead zone for them. So I used my own blog analytics to see whether Google Plus users got referred to my blog.
The number one referral (visitors who came from another sitee) to my blog came from Google.com. That's Google+, right? No. It turns out to be Google Reader. The next most popular referral was Facebook, which was almost as popular. (Though Google Reader users are really engaged: they visit 4 times as many pages as Facebook readers, who presumably see the link, click to read the article, and immediately leave) The next best referral came from Quora, the question answer site. This came as a bit of a surprise. Then the dropoffs become really steep, my own Books web-site and Friendfeed, a so-called "dead" service. (As an aggregate-site of all my online activity, Friendfeed beats the heck out of all the other sites)
By the time I got to Google+ and Hacker News, I'm down to one fifth the visitors that Google Reader sends me. This is incredibly low. I doubt if Quora has 200M users, but their users are incredibly engaged, unlike Google Plus's.
Here are a few lessons I would draw from this:
- RSS support is really important. Reader, Facebook, Quora, and Friendfeed all support RSS export or RSS import so you can track somebody's content. Google Plus insists on you manually typing in a share with no method of automation. Even Twitter supports an auto-export from my blog to my Twitter stream. While I do try to promote blog posts on Google Plus, I don't always do so, especially for book reviews.
- Google Plus is still extremely niche. Even though I'm not active on Hacker News, for instance, it's still way better at sending me referrals than Google Plus.
- Twitter messed up. I have no way whatsoever of tracking Twitter referrals at all. As a result, it's not surprising that I rarely find time to engage on Twitter. But, because of the automation provided for sending blog posts, etc, automatically to Twitter, it costs me nothing to twitter my blog posts, so I do it. Which goes to show that automation will make up for other poor decisions on the social network front.
- I really miss the old Google Reader. The old Google Reader gave me 2X the engagement of the current Google Reader, according to the referral logs. It's a pity Google was willing to give up all that engagement, but I'm guessing that as usual, small fry like me don't count for very much.
9 comments:
The other weirdness about Google+ is that there's no way for people to see that I'm commenting on a post over there. I put up a comment about your post here https://plus.google.com/110159643929963265945/posts/RTFNw9jedQe but it's not like anyone is going to see it if they start here.
That's because G+ doesn't export a feed of any sort, RSS or not. The only API available is the stalker API.
The only people I know that use g+ a lot work at google...
Still, I could see google plus replacing twitter, mainly because I get notifications about g+ in services that I do use on a regular basis, whereas I tend to forget that twitter exists for months at a time.
I also like that it's easier to carry on a conversation in g+ than twitter.
However, as a facebook competitor, I think they have a long way to go. The "circles" thing was cool to play around with, but probably hurt the service. It's not really to google's advantage to have people restrict who they share stuff with, as that just makes the place look dead.
What referrer are you looking for from Google+? We recently made a change to help sites count visits even though they originate from a SSL domain. The new referrerals should be coming from plus.url.google.com, not plus.google.com as before.
I am indeed using plus.url.google.com, which Analytics happily shows as #12.
What about raw google.com search engine traffic?
Raw search traffic is an order of magnitude higher than social networks (i.e., on the order of thousands of visits per month) Engagement per visit is also relatively good.
Mark Suster had a good post on TechCrunch about tracking Twitter traffic through unique URLs. I'm actually probably going to start using awe.sm to get the same information.
http://techcrunch.com/2011/07/14/twitter-drives-4x-as-much-traffic-as-you-think-heres-why/
Hope things are going well, been awhile since Hiring Intergrouplet days. :)
Let me know what you find, because my impression from Twitter today is that it's full of bots who don't actually read content, just post them.
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