If you’ve ever spent any time looking through your website’s Google Analytics reports, you’ll probably have noticed that a considerable proportion of your visitors are classified as ‘Direct’ traffic. Traditionally, this has been interpreted as people typing your website address directly into their browser, or perhaps accessing it through a bookmark they’ve previously saved. However, there’s a good chance that quite a few of those visitors actually arrived through something called ‘dark social’, and you might be surprised by just how much traffic it accounts for. Despite the rather sinister-sounding name, dark social doesn’t have anything to do with the dark web, illegal activity or people secretly browsing Facebook in the middle of the night. It’s simply a term used to describe website traffic generated when people share links privately, through services such as WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, email or other messaging applications, where the original source of the visit can’t easily be identified.
The term was originally coined by Alexis Madrigal in a 2012 article for The Atlantic, when he noticed that an unexpectedly large proportion of the publication’s website traffic appeared to be coming from direct visits. Given that many of these visitors were arriving on articles with relatively long and complicated URLs, it seemed extremely unlikely that they were all typing the addresses into their browsers manually. Instead, it appeared that people were sharing links privately with friends and colleagues, generating traffic that conventional analytics platforms couldn’t properly attribute. More than a decade later, with the enormous popularity of private messaging applications, the problem is potentially even more significant.
How Does Dark Social Work?
Ordinarily, when somebody clicks a link from one website to another, their browser can pass information identifying the referring website. Google Analytics uses this information to help determine where visitors have come from, allowing you to distinguish between traffic from search engines, social media platforms and other websites. However, things become considerably more complicated when somebody copies a link and sends it to a friend through WhatsApp, for example. Depending on how the recipient opens that link, the browser might not provide any information about where it originated. Unless the URL contains additional tracking information, Google Analytics has no reliable way of knowing that the visit came from WhatsApp, so it may classify the session as Direct instead. Imagine that you publish an interesting article on your website, which somebody discovers through Google. They then share it with five friends through WhatsApp, who each visit your website and share it with several more people. Your analytics might record the original visitor as coming from Google, while many of the subsequent visitors appear to have arrived directly.
How Much Traffic Are We Talking About?
This is where things become particularly interesting, because some estimates suggest that dark social accounts for a substantial proportion of online content sharing. Research published by RadiumOne back in 2016 suggested that as much as 84% of consumers’ outbound sharing activity happened through private channels, rather than publicly visible social media posts. That sounds like an enormous figure, although it’s important to distinguish between the proportion of content being shared privately and the proportion of website visits that actually originate from those shares. They’re not necessarily the same thing, and I suspect the figures will vary considerably depending on the type of website you’re operating. A news website publishing articles that people frequently share with friends might experience far more of it than a small ecommerce website selling relatively obscure industrial components. Nevertheless, if you’re seeing a substantial amount of direct traffic arriving on individual blog posts or product pages, rather than simply your homepage, there’s a reasonable possibility that some of those visitors are arriving through private links. After all, how many people do you think are manually typing a 100-character URL into their browser?
Why Does This Matter for Digital Marketing?
The biggest problem with dark social is that it can distort your understanding of which marketing activities are actually generating results. Let’s say you’ve spent several hours creating an article and promoting it through LinkedIn. Somebody sees your post, shares the article with a colleague through Microsoft Teams, and that colleague subsequently visits your website and submits an enquiry. Depending on how the visit is recorded, Google Analytics might attribute that enquiry to Direct traffic, even though the original interest was generated by your LinkedIn activity. If you’re making marketing decisions purely on the basis of what Google Analytics reports, you could conclude that LinkedIn isn’t generating particularly good results, despite it potentially influencing valuable enquiries. This becomes even more significant when you’re trying to calculate the return on investment from different marketing channels. However, I wouldn’t suggest that dark social makes analytics data worthless. It’s simply another reminder that attribution has never been an exact science, and that the reported source of a conversion doesn’t necessarily tell you the full story of how somebody became a customer.
Can You Track Dark Social?
Unfortunately, there’s no straightforward way to identify every visitor arriving through privately shared links, although there are a few things you can do to improve the situation. The first is to make sure you’re using UTM parameters when sharing links through your own marketing campaigns. These allow you to identify the source, medium and campaign associated with a particular visit, even when normal referral information isn’t available. For example, adding utm_source=newsletter and utm_medium=email to links in an email campaign can help Google Analytics identify traffic generated by that campaign. Of course, this doesn’t solve the problem of somebody copying an ordinary website URL and sending it privately to somebody else. You can also examine patterns in your direct traffic, particularly when visitors are arriving on pages that would be unlikely destinations for somebody manually entering a URL. Another useful approach is simply asking customers how they heard about your business. It’s not particularly sophisticated, but sometimes a straightforward question on an enquiry form can reveal information that even the most complicated analytics setup has missed.
Should You Actually Worry About It?
Personally, I wouldn’t lose too much sleep over dark social, particularly if you’re running a relatively small website. It’s certainly useful to understand that some of your direct traffic probably originates from private sharing, and you should be cautious about assuming that Google Analytics provides a complete picture of your marketing performance. However, I think there’s a danger of spending so much time trying to account for every visitor that you lose sight of what you’re actually trying to achieve. If people are sharing your articles, recommending your products or sending links to your website to their friends, that’s generally a positive thing, regardless of whether Google Analytics can identify exactly where those visitors came from. By all means, use UTM parameters, review your attribution reports and make sure your conversion tracking is configured properly, but don’t assume that every unexplained visitor represents a problem that needs solving. Sometimes, the most effective marketing is simply somebody recommending your business to somebody else, and if they’re doing that through WhatsApp rather than Facebook, I’m not particularly bothered whether Google Analytics knows about it.