Google made a small but interesting update to Google+ today. Every profile page now includes the total number of times the user’s content has been seen by others. This new number is the sum of all of the views of the user’s profile, posts and photos since October 2012.
It’s worth noting that this isn’t the first time Google started highlighting these kinds of stats. Google also previously started showing view counts to all of the photos its users share on the service. For now, though, it doesn’t highlight view counts on posts, even though this number does flow into the total view count on the profile page.
If you would rather hide your views, you can also do that from your profile settings.
Google probably hopes that many users will be surprised by how many people have seen their posts. The same probably goes for brands and the many celebrities Google has been courting on Google+.
Overall, Google only makes a very small amount of analytics data available to its users. While the company recently added the ability to see the Google Analytics stats from your Google+ dashboard if you are a page admin, the overall stats displayed there are just for your follower count. Today’s update may be a hint that Google could also start including your Google+ numbers in Google Analytics at some point in the future.
