Google+ Witnesses Traffic Growth Decline: Aberration or Early Sign of Fatigue?

However, Hitwise said on Wednesday that Google+ witnessed a drop in traffic growth for the week ending July 23.

Hitwise said visits to Google+ had soared 283 percent for the week ending July 16 compared to the week before and 821 percent for the week ending July 9 compared to the week before that.

For the week ended July 23, Google+ received only 1.79 million visits (down 3 percent compared to previous week) and the average time spent on the site was also down 10 percent, compared to previous week, to 5 minutes and 15 seconds.

Hitwise didn’t offer any explanation for the drop in numbers.

What could possibly be wrong with Google+?

There could be several reasons but there are solutions too:

No Free Time: Last week, LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner said Google+ won’t catch on because social networks take too much time out of our days and there are already many other good social networks for people to turn to, including Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.

The world’s No.1 social networking site Facebook, Weiner said, is for family and friends, micro-blogging site Twitter is for sending 140-character messages and LinkedIn is for professional life. In this circle of massively successful social networking sites, Google+ has no place. “You introduce Google+, where am I going to spend the next minute or hour of my discretionary time? I have no more time,” Weiner said at an event.

Weiner may be correct. On the other hand, he might also be just trying to talk down a competitor because Tom Anderson, founder of MySpace, had in a guest post on TechCrunch (http://techcrunch.com/2011/07/17/is-social-in-googles-dna/) opined that that distinct networks can thrive in the market and he doesn’t feel social networking is a “zero sum game.”

Google+ Business Profiles Controversy: Google+’s biggest controversy to date is booting corporate profiles because the site hasn’t been optimized for them yet.

According to Christian Oestlien, Google+’s product manager, Google+ is currently “focused on optimizing for the consumer experience” and Google+ “will continue to disable business profiles using regular profiles.”

To avoid deletion, the organization must “find a real person who is willing to represent (it) on Google+ using a real profile as him-or-herself.”

Meanwhile, Google+ will select a limited number of business partners for a test period, Oestlien said.

Those who failed to obey Google+’s diktat, such as blog Search Engine Land, as well as Ford and Sesame Street, were all deleted. Others, like the blog Mashable, escaped the axe because the profile was transferred in the name of the site’s CEO, Pete Cashmore.

Google+’s decision left many businesses bitter and Danny Sullivan, editor of Search Engine Land, didn’t hesitate to say that it smacks of favoritism.

“I know you have great plans to have super wonderful business profiles eventually. But if you’re going to only let a “tiny” number of businesses operate before that, then you taint them and yourselves with favoritism,” Sullivan wrote on an open letter.

Meanwhile, taking advantage of the situation, Facebook was quick to launch Facebook for Business.

Facebook for Business teaches companies how to grow their businesses using Facebook’s “powerful marketing tools” including Facebook Pages and Facebook Ads.

However, it isn’t true that Google+ is ignoring the needs of the corporate. It’s just that Google, which is a consumer-focused company, wasn’t prepared for the flood-rush of companies, nonprofits, bands and other entities that wanted a piece of action in the fledgling social network.

“We have a great team of engineers building a similarly optimized business experience for Google+,” Oestlien said, adding that Google expects “to have an initial version of businesses profiles up and running for EVERYONE in the next few months.”

“Doing it right is worth the wait,” he said.

Chris Murphy of InformationWeek also believes “Google isn’t indifferent to the needs of business.”

“Google’s consumer-first approach can indeed produce creative products for business use. Just go in knowing where you stand in Google’s line,” he said.

And, let’s not forget that Google has already apologized for the matter. Vic Gundotra, Google’s vice president of engineering who is overseeing Google+, has also acknowledged the lapse, saying “We should have anticipated brands and people who want a following would be very frustrated when we didn’t have proper profile support.”

“This is my fault…We prioritized making a great experience for people first. None of our internal models showed this level of growth. We were caught flat-footed,” Gundotra said.

The Google+ team, he added, is doing everything “to accelerate the work to properly handle this case.”

Real Names for Google+ Accounts: A controversy erupted when Google decided that people must use their real name for Google+ accounts or risk being deleted. In other words, Google+ users must use their real names – no handles, no pseudonyms, no group names, not even a nom de guerre. That opened a floodgate of complaints – while some said they used their real name and had their account deleted anyway, others said they should be able to use a pseudonym to protect their privacy.

However, let’s sit back and think for a moment. It’s not that Google wants full legal names. The company just wants to delete obviously fake and offensive names and wants real names so that friends and acquaintances of the users can find them easily on Google+.

Moreover, after the controversy hit a fevered pitch this past weekend, Google has promised to give the affected users a chance to respond and address their grievances.

Exclusivity or Limited Availability: Google+ was launched in its beta phase and people are allowed to use it on ‘invite-only’ basis. Because of the limited availability, it may be that after checking it out and setting up a basic profile, existing Google+ users aren’t finding enough reasons to return because a critical mass of their friends aren’t on it yet.

In other words, if anything, the drop in numbers only indicate that users aren’t too happy with the aura of exclusivity that Google+ currently presents and it could indicate a marketing gimmick that’s run out of steam.

The problem can be easily rectified if Google+ is made open to public in general, which it should be doing anytime soon.

Boring: To keep users for a longer time on Google+, Google will need to ramp up the features on the social networking site. According to Facebook, its users spend over 2 billion minutes a day playing games on their website. If that’s true, Google+ can follow the Facebook model and add social games on the site to make users stay longer. In fact, Google+ games looks inevitable.

Hitwise Data: The numbers thrown up by Hitwise are true but let’s not forget that Hitwise doesn’t measure visits through mobile apps or APIs. In other words, any use of the Google+ app for iPhone or Android isn’t being counted.

Moreover, given that the Google+ iPhone app was launched only last week and has quickly risen to the top of the App Store rankings (even beating Facebook app for iPhone in the process), there’s a good chance that mobile users could have made up for the losses that Hitwise is reporting.

In conclusion, the decline in traffic growth could also be a mere aberration and let’s not sound the alarms just yet. Let’s not judge Google+ too hastily or recklessly. It’s too early to write Google+ off because though the red flag may be up, yet, let’s not forget that Google+ still hasn’t opened up to the public. Google’s action of purging business accounts and fake names, could also be good reasons for contributing to the losses.

However, given Google’s powerful ecosystem of products and services and plenty of hype, Google+ will have no problem in attracting new registered users and converting them into returning visitors.

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How Google Plus changes the game for Ann Arbor’s digital marketing firms

The rise of Google Plus underscores the emerging “intimate relationship between search and social” networking, said Chad Wiebesick, social media and interactive marketing director for Ann Arbor-based PWB Marketing Communications.

For the Ann Arbor area’s digital marketing firms and universities, Google Plus is another tool that needs to be explored and explained to students and clients who are already overwhelmed with the opportunities and demands of digital marketing.

They need to figure it out quickly — because marketing dollars are flooding to the web. In 2011, online advertising spending is expected to rise by more than 20 percent, topping $31 billion, according to a report by research firm eMarketer.com. It’s expected to approach $50 billion by 2015.

Much of that will be spent on search engine ads like Google AdWords — which are still critically important. But I’d argue that search engine optimization — at least as we know it today — will seem quaint in a few years. We’ll look back in amusement on these digitally primitive days in which you could manipulate search engines by strategically tinkering with copy text, titles, links and website structure.

Buzz is building about the introduction of Google Plus, a new social networking tool that’s being described as a legitimate competitor for Facebook. You can build a social profile, accumulate connections, publish status updates and links, comment on other posts and categorize colleagues based on how well you know them. Google Plus reportedly has already attracted more than 20 million users.

The introduction of Google Plus is a tacit acknowledgment that Google has fallen behind Facebook in recognition of how social networking is changing information gathering. Google doesn’t have access to the fast-flowing stream of content being created by hundreds of millions of social networkers who keep their Facebook content private.

“What Google is doing is trying to understand behaviors of how people search and what influences them socially,” said Linda Girard, co-founder of Pure Visibility. “Social influences will be what drives the most relevance going forward.”

Simply put, Google’s search engine is no longer all-inclusive — and it’s slow.

“It’s not meant to be particularly responsive to rapid changes and current events,” said Bud Gibson, an Eastern Michigan University professor who teaches classes about search engine marketing. “As people’s online lives and presence changes, it doesn’t keep up.”

That’s where Google Plus can help. With millions of users offering status updates and links to interesting websites and news stories on a given day, Google is now compiling an ocean of data that can be used to improve its search engine.

In an ideal search world, you would not be able to use SEO to manipulate Google’s search engine. Google would be able to assess your search request and deliver perfect results based on an algorithmic analysis of the entire web, including social networking sites. That’s what Google — and, perhaps Facebook — is driving toward.

“It’s more like intelligent computing,” said Derek Mehraban, CEO of Ingenex Digital Marketing. “One advantage that Google has with Google Plus — assuming that it catches on — is they will have access to that data. If I share more articles on Google Plus, they’re going to be able to see that, which could affect (website) ranking.”

That, of course, would make Google more relevant.

“Google recognizes that having access to this data and access to this experience is critical,” Gibson said.

That’s because Google’s digital reign is far from assured. If you want to know what the public thinks about a hot news story, you should search Twitter, not Google. If you want to know what restaurant to visit tonight in New York, ask your Facebook friends, not Google.

“Where are people going to get recommendations for products?” Wiebesick said. “In days past, it used to be search engines, but more and more now people are going to their friends and professional colleagues, as opposed to search.

“At the end of the day, the more Google can increase search relevancy by identifying me and knowing who my friends are and people I like to hang out and know what my friends like — if Google can highlight those results for me, that helps me.”

While search engine marketing evolves, Ann Arbor’s digital marketers are evolving, too. Corporate clients are demanding help with digital marketing and social media.

In 2011, some 80 percent of U.S. companies with at least 100 employees are using social media websites to market their services and products, according to eMarketer. That’s up from 42 percent in 2008, 58 percent in 2009 and 73 percent in 2010. It’s expected to rise to 88 percent in 2012.

As demand surges for digital marketing help, Ann Arbor’s digital leaders are flourishing. Pure Visibility recently hired several new employees, including a web metrics analyst, SEO analyst and project manager. The company now employs 20 at its headquarters in the First National Bank building on Main Street.

Local digital marketing leaders said it’s too early to tell exactly how Google Plus will be used and how companies can take advantage of it.

But they’re already advising companies to place Google’s “plus one” button on their websites — a tool that allows users to signal their approval of individual pieces of content.

“Now that the mass population is start getting into Google Plus, it has a lot more relevance,” Mehraban said. “We would advise clients to make some modifications to play in that game. We always advise clients to have content that is very shareable.”

Shareable and searchable: That’s how to accumulate relevance.

Contact AnnArbor.com’s Nathan Bomey at (734) 623-2587 or nathanbomey@annarbor.com. You can also follow him on Twitter , follow him on Google Plus or subscribe to AnnArbor.com’s newsletters.

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