Google+ weekly visits on the decline

After surging during the first couple of weeks of July, the number of weekly visitors checking out Google+ has since been falling, according to data released this week by Experian Hitwise.

Google's new social network had been seeing a jump in weekly visits, rising from 200,000 the week ending July 2 to 484,000 the following week and then hitting a peak of 1.8 million the week ending July 16.

Since then, however, the weekly visits have been slowly but steadily declining, according to the data. The week ending August 20 saw a slight bump to 1.23 million from 1.19 million the prior week. But then the numbers fell again last week, dropping to 1.16 million.

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The data only includes direct visits to the Google+ site and does not take into account traffic from mobile devices, applications, or the Google+ notification bar, Experian Hitwise noted.

Launched the last week of June, Google+ soon started to experience a flood of traffic, capturing 1 million people each day and reaching 25 million visitors just in its first month, according to data from ComScore.

But a report from Experian Hitwise released on July 27 had already shown traffic to the site starting to slow. For the week ending July 23, ComScore said there were 1.79 million visits to Google+, a drop of 3 percent from the prior week's 1.86 million.

Further, the amount of time people are spending on the site has gone through some ups and downs since early July.

The recent data from Experian Hitwise showed 2 minutes and 56 seconds as the average amount of time spent on the site the week ending July 2. After jumping to 4 minutes and 52 seconds the following week and 5 minutes and 50 seconds the week ending July 16, the average amount of time has since fluctuated and stood at 5 minutes and 47 seconds last week, virtually the same as it was a month and a half ago.