Dark social is the traffic which cannot be tracked or measured. This happens when a link is shared via chat or email instead of sharing in social media channels. The prevalence of sharing through dark social suggests that social media marketing that fails to focus on the type and quality content may be overlooking a huge portion of social sharing.
In this blog I am going to explain what dark social is and how it can be measured:
If someone clicks your website through social media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin your analytics tool easily tracks the traffic but what if someone has shared your website or blog link through Whatsapp or other messaging tools.
For an instance think can find an interesting article and you want to share it with your team or your loved ones you simply copy the link and shared through whatsapp.
Almost all the people nowadays do this everyday sending lots of traffic to the publishers. The disadvantage of this process is the webmaster or the other website owner cannot able to track the referral traffic which comes through this platforms.
Check out some of this channels which is responsible for dark social traffic:
Mobile apps: Facebook and Instagram
Email: To protect user policy, referrers are not passed.
Messaging apps: Whatsapp, Wechat, Facebook messenger etc.
Is it Matters?
According to the survey almost 65 % of the traffic comes from all the online referrals come from dark social across the world. It is the chunk of referral traffic which is extremely difficult to track accurately instead it shows that the traffic is direct.
If you don’t know this you might be in trouble by analyzing wrong traffic source or other things of your website and you will wasting your time in optimizing wrong things.
Dark social traffic is extremely valuable. It is effectively word of mouth promotion technique among the people.
Can we do something about it?
You won’t be able to track the dark social traffic, but here I am sharing some useful techniques to make these things work.
