News has leaked that Google Analytics is on its way to Google+ profiles. If the leak is reliable and the rumours are true, this could be an important milestone in the diffusion of Google+ into the mainstream mindset. Everyone is curious about who views their profile. The popularity of fake apps on facebook that promise to reveal viewers, usually with a status update saying “OMG, my creepy ex viewed my facebook 226 times” shows the level of interest in finding out who viewed your profile. Facebook repeatedly says that no app can give you this information because it isn’t made available to anyone. If this kind of information becomes available on Google+, even in an aggregated, geographically imprecise and half-anonymous way, it will still be attractive to users who know how to extract real information from Google Analytics.
Facebook Insights is pretty good but it’s only for pages, not for profiles. If Google Analytics provides the same level of detail to Google+ pages as it does to websites, natural curiosity about who is looking at what could be a significant motivation to post on Google+. We all know that far more people view our facebook posts than like or comment on them, but that’s the only real metric we have, unless we use url shorteners to post links, and that’s not a reliable measure either. We have no idea how many times a particular photo or album has been viewed, no idea how many individual users viewed it and no idea how long our friends or general users spend on our and profiles. If Google Analytics brings some of this functionality to Google+ pages, maybe we’ll pay more attention to our Google+ profiles in future. What do you think? Do you want to know who’s viewing your social media profiles? Let me know in the comments.
