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.

Fab.com is hot, hot, hot. The daily deals site has seen some amazing growth in the past four months alone, and it doesn’t look to be slowing down at all.

Today, Fab CEO Jason Goldberg shared some interesting stats and trends on his personal blog about the company.

Most notably, Fab saw its direct traffic pass traffic from email for the first time since ever last month. That means that the company has serious brand reputation which could be driving some wild word of mouth advertising.

In his post, Goldberg shared a graph showing the jump:

His insights on why this is?

We believe that the rise in direct traffic is because of 3 reasons:
- Mobile visits now account for nearly 1/3 of all visits.
- More and more people are just typing in www.fab.com into their browser at 11am ET / 8am PT each day instead of waiting to click on our emails.
- With 2 million members now, growing by 450,000 in January 2012 alone, we’ve reached a bit of a tipping point in general awareness of Fab.

The fact that its email traffic has dominated so much is a testament to how much its members love the service. That much traffic just from email campaigns is impressive.

Speaking of hot services, Goldberg also pointed out that Pinterest has now passed Twitter in referral traffic to the site, a pretty impressive feat for a service that’s still in its infancy as well.

On Feburary 7th, 2011, the entire Gawker Media style changed from a typical one you’d see on a blog to a hipper more programmed feel. The design focused on a top story and then listed out others along the side in a static bar.

Some people called it horrific, some used the word “satanic“. Well all of those negative words about Gawker’s redesign can probably be put to rest.

According to a few tweets from Gawker head honcho Nick Denton today, the network saw a lift of over 10 million monthly unique visitors from this point last year:

Yep, January’s in. 35.6m people globally: tinyurl.com/janglobal Interesting: no lift from trade shows. yfrog.com/mmg26xp

— Nick Denton (@nicknotned) February 2, 2012

For obsessive Gawker watchers and redesign doom-mongers: the 35.6m uniques in Jan 2012 is record and 55% up from last April’s nadir.

— Nick Denton (@nicknotned) February 2, 2012

It seems like the redesign didn’t scare people away after all, as you can tell by the graph that Denton includes with this tweet. With 35.6m unique visitors in January, the network just saw its best traffic ever.

So just when you think something is so radical and can’t work simply because it’s different, remember Gawker’s redesign. It actually worked.