Google+ Traffic Dives by more than 50% [Chitika]

Advertising network Chitika has released internal data suggesting that Google+ has lost momentum shortly after its public availability. After a spike on September 23 and 23, Chitika shows that the Google+ traffic dropped back to previous levels.

While this is interesting, Chitika doesn’t provide much information about its data-gathering technique. Because it is an ad-network, one may suspect that it can see the referrer (Google+) to sites using its ad code. If that’s the case (and I’m not saying that it is), the method is not very accurate but one could argue that they should be able to pick up a (very) gross trend snapshot.The bottom-line is that Google+ saw a traffic spike during its public opening and that it subsequently faded, and I can believe that. This sound quite “normal” to me, though. Secondly, second-hand data sampling on a 10-day period is hardly enough to tell if Google+ is a “failure to launch” as Chitika puts it, so I think that there’s a bit of over-dramatization here.

It will take months (or years) and many evolution before we realize how well (or not) Google+ does/did. In the meantime, and as long as we don’t know how this data was measured, I would advise taking this with a grain of salt.