Measurability. That is one of the most important pillars of a (digital) marketing strategy. We measure, test and 'hack' ourselves to a successful campaign. Yet we have a huge blind spot: dark social . This type of traffic will be one of the biggest challenges for marketers worldwide in the coming period. It is increasing in use and it cannot be measured. In my opinion, it is at the same time the best traffic you can get. By the way, it is also the most difficult to get moving. High time for a strategy!
Dark social is, in short, sharing content via private channels such as Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp and email job function email database These private channels do not provide any 'referrer data' that tells a website's analytics tool where the traffic is coming from.
Google Analytics shows such traffic as direct traffic. People often think that direct traffic is only formed by people who have typed the URL in full, but the popular tool puts everything under 'direct' that it does not know where it comes from. The result is that marketers cannot measure the conversion from these dark channels. Many therefore ignore it. Wrongly so.
The term “dark social” was coined by journalist Alexis Madrigal of The Atlantic in 2012. Madrigal says that in our analytics, we only see the tip of the iceberg. All of our A/B tests, hacks, and other adjustments to our campaigns and online content are based on that tip.
Dark social is the most important channel for website traffic. High time for a dark social strategy.