Over the past few days there has been a lot of buzz surrounding the coverage of Google+, particularly focusing on the measured 60% downward trend seen in the site’s traffic as reported by Chitika Insights. In further investigation of this matter, Chitika researched traffic patterns of the social network to determine whether the downward trend witnessed was a short term fluctuation as some proposed, or just the start of a longer term trend.
The data revealed that the trend seems to be continuing. Although Google+ saw a brief uptick in the sites traffic after it went public, Chitika Insights reported a prolonged and sustained downward trend in overall activity coming from the site. The new data reveals an even sharper drop in traffic from its peak of 70%.
This prolonged downhill trend is potentially impacted by the following reasons:
- Google may have focused too much on building a social network that would be able to compete with Facebook, rather than innovating and developing one which could outperform it.
- By failing to provide developers with an API, which would support a network of useful services for their users, Google created a hurdle for themselves as they continue to be out-developed by Facebook.
- Facebook also contributed to limiting the success of Google+ in taking precautionary measures to corral their users and prevent them from switching to the new social network. This effectively restricted users ease of transition and Google+’s ability to expand.
Over the next several months, pay close attention to Google+ as it makes its attempt to claw its way up through the ranks of social networks. If Google is able to implement a platform which supports the development of a network of services which promotes user activity and accessibility, they may be successful in reversing this downward trend. Or, perhaps not — but only time will tell . . .
If you are interested in how these figures were acquired, the methodology was posted in this recent Chitika Insights post.
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