Dark Social: The Black Hole of Your Referral Traffic

Messaging apps continue to be on the rise with no end in sight, and they come with a bunch of new opportunities for marketers. The prize: billions of active monthly users, the coveted Millennial and Generation Z consumers included. The four most popular messaging apps already have more monthly active users than the four major social networks.

The marketing potential is endless: AI-based technologies are bridging the gap between users and brands on a one-to-one base, offering bots for ordering pizza and settling customer service questions in private.

Messengers have billions of users. According to a recent estimate, 16% of the world’s population is using Whatsapp. 

There are great examples on how brands are leveraging this, but the age of messenger communication also comes with a new set of challenges that already have an impact on your brand.

The question is: How big is that impact and how are brands supposed to measure it?

What is Dark Social?

Dark Social describes the “invisible” shares that happen through channels like messengers, but also email and text messages.

If you go to the New York Times right now, pick any article and send the URL via Facebook Messenger to one of your friends, you’ve shared it via Dark Social. For the NYT team it will come up as “Direct”, even though you didn’t type the whole link into your browser. They won’t know where you got the article from, making Dark Social a form of referral traffic that is attributed to the wrong channel.

The term Dark Social was coined by Alexis Madrigal of the Atlantic in 2012, who then said we’re only seeing – and measuring – the tip of the sharing iceberg. And he was right, of course. The private nature of these channels makes it near impossible for marketers to find out easily what the source of the traffic is.

How Big a Problem is Dark Social for Brands?

The crux of the matter: how do you produce numbers for something that can’t be measured?

The Dark Social stats that are being cited in many articles trace back to only one source, marketing firm RadiumOne that says more than 80% of all shares are “dark”. Welp. That would mean you’re basing your advertising dollars on only 20% of what’s actually happening – not a great idea. But don’t take out the big red marker just yet.

According to RadiumOne data, 84% of shares happen via Dark Social.

For the Atlantic, Madrigal wanted to know a ballpark estimate on Dark Social shares, and together with their web analytics firm came up with a relatively straightforward way to show how much traffic was falsely attributed to “Direct”.

Of all the “Direct” visitors, they excluded people that landed on the homepage or a category page, essentially leaving only the people reaching a post because they’d gotten the link from somewhere.

Combining this with their available sharing data, they got to this graph, which says more than 50% of their social traffic happens via Dark Social.

That was in 2012, when messengers were less popular. But still, keep in mind that not all brands are the Atlantic. Social traffic is a lot more important to big brands and news outlets than, say, a B2B marketer.

I go by “never trust a stat you haven’t faked yourself”, so we did our own little bit of research to see how Dark Social affects Talkwalker.

The percentage of Talkwalker’s Direct traffic isn’t as high as other sources have reported, but still significant.

If we look at our “Direct” traffic in Google Analytics and exclude traffic to the homepage, landing page and app, we see that 21% of our traffic comes from Dark Social sources.

We also looked at the lead figures for a recent webinar. 5% were attributed to Direct by Google Analytics, even though the signup page was not accessible anywhere on the website. That means it’s not possible that these people landed on the page directly and our analysis wasn’t entirely accurate.

Whatever the number is for your brand, your web analytics are probably a little wonky in this respect.

Why Should Brands Care About Dark Social?

Social attribution, or assigning credit to your social efforts, is something that will only gain in importance. CMOs want to track where their dollars are going and be able to show what they get out of social. You want to make the best possible decision, so you need numbers that tell the truth without obfuscating anything.

But rather than thinking about it as something you’re not doing well just yet, think of all the future potential. Dark Social is definitely an area of potential for brands, and marketers should start to leverage it where they can. The biggest part of this is making sure you’ve got access to the right data. You can only make informed decisions about where to spend your dollars if you know what’s working and what isn’t.

Create a Dark Social segment in Google Analytics and find out what percentage of your traffic is being attributed to the wrong source. Analyze earned, owned and paid together, so you can start optimizing and tweaking campaigns and content to enable customers move along their purchase path.

In your social media analytics tool you can overlay it with your mentions and social shares to shed some light on how your customers are sharing.

If you want to go even further, we’ve listed some tools below that help you make sense of Dark Social traffic.

Tools to Measure Your Dark Social Traffic

If Dark Social is something that your brand is concerned about, look at some of these tools:

• Use linkshorteners like Bitly or Owly. They’re an option that help to bring some light to your sharing and you can get a better understanding of the clicks your links receive if you use a tracked link.
• Improve your sharing buttons: sharethis is a tool which lets you implement inline or sticky share buttons to make it easier to track if people share your content via email, messenger or text.
• If you want to really crack the Dark Social code, look at GetSocial or Po.st – they’re pricy options, but you’ll know you’ve covered your bases.