FROM: http://www.cardinalpath.com/google-user-statistics-what-do-they-mean/
December 30, 2011 by Kent Clark
We all know the spiel, right? We don’t count hits when we should count visitors. We don’t count visitors when we should count interactions. We don’t count interactions when we should count conversions. Etc. Etc.
Know what you’re measuring, right?
In the Web Analytics space it’s accepted practice, but the more I read from other circles, the more I want to tear at my hair in disgust.
The most recent example of this came from an article from Marketing Vox titled Google+ Growth Points to Serious Facebook Competition. It cites numbers from Paul Allen’s fantastic Google+ post Google+ Growth Accelerating. Passes 62 million users. Adding 625,000 new users per day. Prediction: 400 million users by end of 2012.
Allen’s stats are pretty good: Google+ has grown by 24% in December, and if it maintains current daily sign ups, it will be at 400 million users come end of 2012.
From Paul Allen's Google+ Account
In comparison Facebook boasts 750 million active users. It seems Google + is set to catch up…
Note: An interesting method from Max Huijgen shows about 86 million accounts as of December 29th. I don’t think this is very accurate, however. It doesn’t count accounts that are set not to show in search results, the number seems to vary depending on the machine used, and most damningly, when you change the URL to plus.google.com/u/ (users), the number drops to 27k.
Wait, hold up. This is the point where you stop and ask what we’re counting.
The problem here is that users != active users. Users is a measure of accounts, active users is a measure of accounts that log in over some interval (once a month in Facebook’s case, I believe). So this comparison is rather apples to oranges.
Active is an important distinction because inactive users are a completely worthless metric for determining the success of a network. Paul Allen brings up the network effect as an example of the importance of user base, but I don’t think he focuses enough on one of the key aspects of it:
When network effect is present, the value of a product or service is dependent on the number of others using it.
Number of users isn’t really a useful metric because it tells you nothing about the network’s use. Active users is a little better but still lacks any detailed information. Do people log in, check their wall, and leave? Do they engage with others? Do they engage with brands?
Twitter, for instance, has 150 million accounts, but only 56 million of that follow 8 or more people, and only 12 million that follow 64 or more. This means that between 1/10th to 1/3rd of its total base actually engages with anyone.
Facebook claims higher, but I’d be interested in finding comparable statistics. Of it’s 750 million users who visit every month, about half visit daily, and they average 160 odd friends. ~425m daily users means that there is a pretty large potential audience base out there, but what does this mean for any particular user or marketer?
Truthfully, we don’t have a good way to compare usage of Facebook and Google+ right now, but we can take some guesses by looking at activity. For instance, the Coca-Cola Facebook page has 36,547,311 likes, with ~250 posts a day (all by users, not counting comments on those posts). Meanwhile, the Coca-Cola Google+ page has has 2947 +1s, and hasn’t had an update in two days. The number of users is likely affected by the age of the Facebook page (since Google+ Pages have only been around for a couple of months), but the lack of activity on the Google+ page is symptomatic of the problems that Google+ is facing.
As far as personal use goes, we have even less data, though Paul Allen notes that, according to his research, Google+ currently gets 5x more photo uploads than Facebook, with numbers hitting 10 billion uploaded photos by mid-January. Perhaps, he points out, because of instant upload (and perhaps because of Picasa). This number does seem a little dubious though, as Facebook claims that they have 250 million photos uploaded a day, which would place Google+’s numbers at 1.25 billion. Google+ users apparently really like to take photos.
However, despite the dreary looking activity on Google+ pages, there is a ray of light. Chitika reports that traffic was up 55% from September to October, with a further 41% from October to November. So more people are actually checking Google+, the question is are they interacting?
That is left to be seen.
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