Google Narrows Facebook’s Social Login Lead In Janrain’s Q4 Report

Google cut into Facebook’s lead in the social login market in the fourth quarter of 2014, according to data released Thursday by online customer management firm Janrain.

After gaining share for two consecutive quarters, Facebook dropped 3 percentage points to 43% in Q4. That’s only 3 points above Google’s 40%, the closest margin since Facebook took the lead in Janrain’s data in the first quarter of 2011. Google’s Q4 increase was 6 percentage points.

So what’s going on?

Jamie Beckland, Janrain’s vice president of marketing, said Google’s gains can be attributed to the company’s efforts to unify identity across products such as Gmail, YouTube, Android and Google+, “making it a lot stickier for those customers who use one or more of their services.”

Beckland continued: “At the same time, Facebook made headlines throughout 2014 around issues like data privacy — which may have contributed to some social login users choosing to go with another identity provider for lack of understanding how their data is shared or used by a brand. We do know, however, that both companies’ updates to their social login apps this year — Facebook’s new anonymous login and line-by-line control, as well as Google’s deprecation of Google login in favor of Google+ — will likely move the numbers again.”

It must be noted that Janrain’s results are only one snapshot of the social login market; the company pulls the data from the hundreds of clients that use its platform. Gigya, another provider of social login widgets for websites, won’t release its Q4 report until later in the month, but its Q3 results showed Facebook with a 58% to 24% advantage over Google.

And LoginRadius, another competitor, released a report this week showing Facebook’s lead at a dominating 65%-25%. LoginRadius, which says it provides social login and sharing tools for 120,000 websites globally, shows that Facebook’s lead has never been higher since it began tracking in January 2013.

In other words, your mileage may vary. All sources agree, of course, that after Facebook and Google there’s a huge dropoff in the overall results. Part of that is due to the fact that most websites with a social sign-in widget include Facebook and Google as options — LoginRadius pegs percentages of use by sites in its network at 97% for Facebook and 69% for Google with Twitter (51%) and LinkedIn (48%) the only other providers near 50%.

LinkedIn Moves Into The B2B Lead

Janrain’s Q4 results show that LinkedIn is now the top choice for B2B social logins, gaining 6 percentage points over Q3. The career-focused social network now has a 35% B2B share according to Janrain. Google (28%) and Facebook (24%) each dropped 3 percentage points compared to the previous quarter.

Facebook maintained double figure leads in each of the other verticals tracked by Janrain — Media, Retail, Entertainment/Gaming, Music and Consumer Brands, but Google pulled significantly closer in Music and Consumer Brands. Google gained 12 percentage points in Music, while Facebook lost 8, leaving Facebook with a 51% to 28% advantage. In Consumer Brands, Facebook leads 49% to 38% after falling 3 percentage points; Google gained 7 percentage points in the category.

For a more detailed look at the data and more charts, see Janrain’s blog.

You can download LoginRadius’ report here.