Google+ saw nearly half as many unique visitors as Twitter at the end of 2011

While traffic stats can be a tricky thing, one thing they’re good for is to judge growth trends. According to a new report by web traffic analyst Compete, Google+ saw impressive growth towards the end of 2011.

Google’s social network, which has come under fire since its heavy integration in Google’s main product, search, saw nearly half as many unique visitors as Twitter did in December of 2011.

Compete says that Twitter had 40,411,065 unique visitors during that month, and Google+ had an impressive 20M during the same time-frame.

After seeing a slight dip in visitors in October of last year, it looks like Google+ righted the ship and had a strong end of the year, which is good news for Google since it’s clearly putting all of its social eggs into the Google+ basket.

The below chart shows the traffic statistics for Google+ since Compete started tracking them, which was as soon as the site became public:

In addition to Google+ becoming more popular as a social destination, Compete shares that its +1 feature which is embedded on a variety of blogs and other external sites saw a rise in popularity as well. To grab those numbers, Compete tracked the subdomain for the +1 button, which is http://plusone.google.com, and saw over 40M uniques in December 2011 (the feature was only widely released in November):

While we should all take these numbers with a grain of salt, its clear that Google+ grabbed a solid userbase and continues to trend upwards in popularity when it comes to monthly unique visitors. While the site is nowhere near the traffic that Facebook sees on a daily basis, the company will definitely continue to push the product forward and we’ll be watching.