Did you know that a large portion of your direct traffic may not be direct traffic, but social media shares that have been falsely categorised? 'Dark social' is the menacing name given to social media platforms that analytics programs aren’t able to recognise and identify.
The concept of dark social is one that’s becoming increasingly important for any inbound marketer to understand when analysing the success of their digital marketing strategies. This blog post will explain how it’s affecting your inbound marketing campaigns and what you can do about it.
What is direct traffic?
About referral URLs
So what platforms count as dark social, and why are they recognised as direct traffic? The answer lies within the referral URLs users have with them when they visit your website.
Every time a user visits a new site, they bring with them the URL of their previous page. Your analytics software uses a visitor’s referral URL to guess how they navigated to your site. Had they previously been on a search engine, your software will categoris them as an organic search source. If the referral URL contains the address of a social media site, your program will categorise them as a social media source.
About dark social platforms
Dark social are platforms that don’t provide valid referral URLs that are recognisable by your analytics software. When a user visits your site without a recognisable referral URL, your analytic program will assume that they entered the link to your website directly into their browser.
While this assumption may have been accurate in the past, there has been a significant increase in the use of social media platforms that don’t provide referral URLs, namely online messaging and mobile applications such as Skype or WhatsApp.
In addition, users that visit your site through links shared in emails also don’t provide recognisable referral URLs, as email services have encrypted their data to protect their users' privacy.
How dark social affects analytics
Understanding the impact unrecognisable referal URLs have on analytics programs is more important than ever. RadiumOne estimates that 84% of all social media shares are now done through dark social platforms, up from 69% in 2014. This isn’t too surprising considering that the number of WhatsApp users has increased from 200 million in 2013 to 1 billion in 2016 and that mobile traffic is now almost on par with desktop traffic.
This means that your social media campaign may be much more effective than your sources report suggests, with many of your sources generated through social media channels being miscategorised as direct traffic sources.
What to do about dark social
So what can be done? Unfortunately, there isn't yet a method for accurately detecting dark social sources. But there are steps you can take to provide more useful data for campaign reporting.
Use UTM parameters
It's possible to provide each campaign link with a unique UTM parameter (a tag you add to a URL). This allows your sources report to better reflect the effectiveness of each campaign.
Adding UTM parameters to URLs linking to your page means that sources generated through those links will always be categorised by your analytics software according to the link's UTM parameter. This means that while you won’t know which platforms are being used to share links, you’ll be able to know which campaigns are generating the most shares.
Check out HubSpot's guide on UTM parameters to learn more.
Wait for social media platforms to make changes
Apart from the use of UTM parameters, all that can be done is to hope that social media developers make their platforms friendlier towards marketers and analytics programs. Facebook has already made some strides towards this, with their messaging app now providing referral links to outgoing users, shedding some light on what would otherwise be a big contributor to dark social shares.
Until then, understanding and accounting for the effects of dark social will continue to be one of the many challenges marketers will have to face in this new digital landscape.
