Those Huge Google+ Profile Views Are Not Exactly What You Think

The first time I checked my Google Plus profile to see over 100 million views last year, I was very surprised. Back then, Google was showing authorship on posts when you search on Google and my assumption was that most of these views came from Google search. After all, my Google+ profile link appeared next to my articles then.

Google decided to remove authorship from search results and the views kept increasing. Right now, my Google+ profile views stands at over 205 million and this proves that those views isn’t coming from SERP.

Are these views actually real or Google is just trying to lure some of us to the social network, trying to make us believe Google+ isn’t actually a silent graveyard?

Right now, I have over 200 million views and with the rate it’s growing, I may end up with over 220 million views before the end of the year.

Are these views even real?

I’ve been asking myself that question for a while now. On Google+, you’ll find people with huge numbers of followers with very little views and at the same time, you’ll find people with very few followers but with millions of profile views.

Google+ is one of the platforms I share my blog posts and the stats just don’t add up. If I’m getting like 2 million page views on Google+ profile monthly, I should be getting at least 100,000 Google+ referral traffic on the blog each month, right? I don’t even get 10% of that from Google+ monthly and I just can’t help but deduce that the views can’t be real. Those huge numbers from my profile views doesn’t reflect on the engagement of the Google+ profile page.

Where are the views coming from?

According to Google, the numbers tell you how many times your content has been seen by people. This includes your posts, your photos and of course, the page itself. This means that anytime your post is shown on Google+ stream, shared, +1d, displayed in Picassa or shown on Blogger, it all counts towards your overall number of views. We don’t know if Youtube videos linked to a Google+ account also counts towards the total page views though.

If you’re having photos in your Picassa album used to build a blogger template (which I have done), this may affect your Google+ profile views (theoretically).

The numbers are meaningless

If you’re using your Google+ profile views as the sole yardstick to measure your social media success on Google+, you should think again. As seen in an experiment by Masatake here, these numbers can be manipulated and inflated. It’s not actually how many times your profile has been viewed and to me, this defeats the purpose of the feature.

Whether large or small, I’m convinced the numbers are meaningless. It’s not something you should be worried about, user engagement on your page matters more.