Traffic to Google+ Grew 12 Times Last Week

Google's move to open up Google+ last week was a great one for the social network. Along with the Google homepage ad, it contributed to quite a large bump in user numbers and visitors in the last week.

The latest estimates put Google+ user numbers at almost 50 million. Now, Hitwise is saying that traffic jumped 1,269 percent last week compared to the one before it.

In total, the site was visited 15 million times from the US alone last week, quite a huge increase from previous periods. This helped propel Google+ to the top 10 social networks in the US, by traffic.

"Opening access created a massive spike in market share of visits for the site, with a 1269% growth from the week ending September 17th to the week of September 24th. The site also received nearly 15 million total US visits last week," Hitwise reports.

"In just one week, Google+ went from ranking as 54th most visited site in our Social Networking and Forums category to 8th place," it said.

Note that the stats are only for the regular Google+ site. Mobile traffic, from the app and, presumably, from mobile browsers, is not included and neither are interactions via the Google navbar.

The navbar holds notifications from Google+, but also enables users to reply to comments and posts shared with them, plus one replies and do other interactions.

Hitwise also observed that the users visiting Google+ are shifting from the Early Adopter crowd to what it calls Early Mainstream, regular users that have a tendency to start using products and services just ahead of everyone else.

Still, it's too early to call Google+ a success. It may have been able to attract early adopters and it may even be able to attract mainstream users. The real challenge though is keeping them around, something Twitter is still struggling with today.