Google+ "analysis" - This week's useless Google+ stat: slowing time on site

Google+ "analysis" - This week's useless Google+ stat: slowing time on site

Ready for this week's ridiculous Google+ "analysis"? OK, don't say I didn't warn you:

Because users spent 3 seconds less on the Google+ Web site last week than they did during the peak week of July 15, "the service may struggle to make headway against Facebook," Bloomberg reports. Even though time on site has been increasing each week of August versus the week before.

[Pause as I bang head against wall several times.]

Would it have been possible to resist the lure of the sensational headline long enough to ponder why that single data point in no way justifies such a conclusion?

• It's summer vacation time, which often causes dips in Internet usage, especially for professional sites. Did anyone check to see if the same time-on-site August dip v. prior months happened to, say, LinkedIn? It's often more useful to compare year-over-year usage stats, which factors out expected seasonal changes, than week-to-week fluctuations. But of course Google+ is too new to have that kind of data history.

• The Google+ iPhone app was approved on July 19. Time spent on the Google+ Web site declined a bit since then. Why is this a surprise? Perhaps a higher percentage of power users v. casual check-ins are accessing the service on a mobile device, where Experiean Hitwise can't measure it?

• Users can read their Google+ notifications while on any other Google service such as Gmail, Google Docs or the main Google search engine. One important goal for Google+ is to integrate it with other Google services. I suspect a key stat for Google is whether Plus is helping to boost overall usage of all its offerings, not just the social network itself.

"Experian Hitwise's research methods, which rely on visits to websites, don't include mobile users or times when people access the service from the black notification bar runing across the top of Google.com," the Bloomberg story admits -- way down toward the end, far below the alarming conclusion drawn from one incomplete data point.

Actually, time spent on Google+ last week versus the prior week was up 4%, according to the story. But that "has grown more slowly in recent weeks, according to Experian Hitwise ..." which apparently is cause to wonder whether Google+ can compete with Facebook -- completely leaving out the possibility that Google+ could manage to succeed without, say, destroying Facebook.

It was just a couple of weeks ago that the Google+ news from Hitwise on Twitter was, "Avg. time spent on Google+ up 5% in last 2 weeks" -- which sounded more positive than negative, although those stats were also below the mid-July peak.

OK, this isn't quite as bad as the "83% of Google+ users are inactive" claim, which turned out to be inaccurate. But it's not a great deal better to take a single data point out of context and draw conclusions that don't stand up to even a little critical analysis.