Posts Tagged ‘Searching’

Google’s super beta social networking “Google +” somehow slowed in traffic over the last week. Experian Hitwise made a report finding that both users and traffic through the website fell last week. Experian Hitwise is a global intelligence service that monitors traffic for online sites.  Matt Tathum, an Experian rep, made sure that his findings were correct so as not to overplay the issue. The company gets their information from extrapolating data from ISPs and an opt-in panel of around 2.5 million users.

A total traffic decline of around 3% to 1.79 million over the last week ending July 23 compared to the last seven days, was the research company’s findings. Google+ ended up with 1.86 million visits the week prior. The average time on Google+ this week was down 10%, from 5 minutes and 50 seconds to 5 minutes and 15 seconds. Experian’s research methods are only for website traffic alone, which means they can only check the traffic to the website. These findings do not include mobile users and third-party application users. I was on my account last week, but it was from my phone, so they might not have been able to track my usage.

This report comes only after a steady increase in traffic since it’s launch on June 28. Only last week, comScore made a report of the network hitting 20 million unique visitors. I don’t know about you, but it seems kind of early to be slowing down. Google+ has been TESTING for one month and it has a little around 18 million users. That’s a lot, but not enough that it should be losing steam this early. Just imagine what’s going to happen when it’s open to everyone, and out of its testing version. What do you think will happen with this project? Leave your comments after the jump.

Read more: Google + Traffic Drops!