I was fortunate enough to luck into a few Spotify invitations earlier today, so I decided to try a little experiment in checking out click-through rates on Google+ vs. Twitter. I put similar offers up on Twitter and Google+ at the same time (7:38am PDT on a Thursday), and checked to see what drove traffic over to the blog. (I turned off comments on the Google+ offer, so folks could only go to the blog and to not split the sample.)
Twitter Offer
Google+ Offer
To give a little more context, here are the relative sizes of those two groups. Not exacty the same size, but close:
- Twitter: 5,352 followers
- Google+: 4,010 people have me in Circles
I then grabbed my referrer data to that post on the blog over the period of a few hours after these both went up.
Over that time, I had about 60 clicks recorded in the logs. I was surprised to find the raw number of click-throughs from Google+ was about 4x what it was from Twitter, even though the followship was a little smaller. (There’s also a big group with "no referrer," that could have come from clients or other sources.)
Number of click throughs, by source
So, it’s a small sample size, but it’s still notable, I think. I’ll be interested to see what kinds of experiences others have as they try similar experiments. Thoughts?
Update: Tac Anderson notes in the comments that "you can pretty much count 90% of those no referrer directly to Twitter clients." So, if that’s the case, we’re at about parity on the click-through rate between Twitter and Google+, with Twitter being slightly higher in aggregate between the traffic explictly attributed to Twitter and adding in the ‘no referrer’ traffic that likely came from Twitter clients.
