“Dark Social” Affecting Web Traffic

            Web metrics are an interesting creature.  Suites like Google’s Analytics provide an absolute wealth of information about visitors to a website, but there are unfortunately some things such a package is not yet able to measure.  Even more unfortunate is that some can’t measure a traffic source that is spreading extremely quickly – inbound visitors from social sharing.

            Now, it should be noted that not all social media is created equal.  Generally speaking, you have large-scale services like Facebook and Twitter that rely heavily on social networking, and slightly smaller services like Reddit, Digg and StumbleUpon that operate as forum-type enterprises that exist heavily on user-generated and user-promoted content.  With any of these groups, when a visitor arrives to your website via a link posted to them, it is quite visible.  In fact, that traffic can often times be traced back to the very page in which it originated.  But there are often bits of traffic that defy common logic.  Almost always listed as the rather innocuous “direct traffic”, these visitors can at times account for a very large volume of all inbound visits.  Unable to be classified by origin, this traffic is referred to by The Atlantic’s Senior Editor Alexis Madrigal as “dark social.”

            Dark social is a form of linking to web content that Madrigal associates with being outside of the typical social arena, namely links and content being shared via email, texts and instant messaging.  While these links are by definition “shared”, when clicked, they bring a visitor directly to the content with no stops in between.  Because of this, a marketer or web developer has trouble determining the origin of the visit.  Having this bit of knowledge helps in establishing future marketing programs based on popular outlets that generated interest for an organization and can or should be pursued further.

            Matt Buchanan, a Buzzfeed.com tech writer disagrees ever so slightly.  As a rebuttal to Madrigal, Buchanan states, “It might be more accurate to call the universe of direct traffic the noumenal web— a big, messy bowl of stuff that we know is there but whose composition we can’t actually probe with any of our traditional senses (in this case, web analytics, or our nose)” (Rosales, 2012).  Buchanan goes on to emphasize that not all direct traffic is dark social, or can be classified as dark social.  It is merely a source of visitors that doesn’t report where it is coming from.  There is simply no referral data attached to the visit (Buchanan, 2012).

            The numbers fail in helping an organization fully understand their inbound traffic and where to direct resources for future endeavors.  Does that mean Google Analytics isn’t good for anything else?  Of course not.  Such a service, which can be had for free, still provides ample information related to overall web traffic.  No matter the nomenclature, this unverifiable type of traffic represents an inherent flaw in modern web analytics, but provides insight into social sharing before social media was a “thing”.  In fact, it has all outward appearances of an untraceable word-of-mouth type of marketing – something some marketers would agree is the most powerful type of marketing there is. 

References

Buchanan, M. (2012, October 22) There's Less “Dark Social” Than Meets The Eye. Retrieved October 29, 2012 from http://www.buzzfeed.com/mattbuchanan/theres-less-dark-social-than-meets-the-eye/

Rosales, L. (2012, October 22) Dark social: the website traffic data that we never see. Retrieved October 29, 2012 from http://agbeat.com/real-estate-technology-new-media/dark-social-the-website-traffic-data-that-we-never-see/