For media companies looking to build and drive traffic online, it’s not enough to just produce great content. Publishers should measure where their traffic is coming from and use those learnings to develop a content marketing strategy informed by data, such as what channels are best for distribution and what time of day a target audience is most likely to see the content.
To measure traffic, media companies rely on analytics programs such as Google Analytics or comScore Digital Analytix. But these programs don’t always tell the full story. Due to a number of factors, referral sources for some web traffic are uncategorized by analytics programs. These visits are known as “dark traffic.”
How Dark Traffic Originates
Analytics programs typically group traffic by referral source. “Direct” refers to people who access a website by typing in the URL, for example, and “social” refers to people who access content via a link on social media. “Organic search” traffic comes from people who access content via a search engine.
But as link sharing gets more granular, analytics programs are unable to track referral data and instead group traffic in a generic “other” category. Examples of traffic that commonly gets put into this bucket are visitors who click on a link shared via a messaging platform or forwarded email, or users whose browser settings are set to private. Links placed on secure websites are usually filtered into this category, as well.
The Extent of the Problem
No one really knows how much web traffic is categorized as dark – because the term refers to uncategorized traffic, it’s impossible to measure. There are some estimates, however.
The Atlantic, which is credited with coining the term “dark social” in 2012, used to think that dark visitors accounted for about 25% of the activity on its site. Now, editors suspect that that total is closer to 40%, according to a recent article on Digiday.com. In any event, the problem is big, and it’s growing.
Adjusting to a new reality
To combat the problem of “dark traffic,” media companies are developing workarounds to help them track their hits.Many publishers already generate specific links for emails to ensure that they can be tracked separately from other traffic hitting a piece of content. Another technique is to monitor brand mentions on “dark” social networks, such as Instagram or subreddits, and see if they correlates with an increase in uncategorized traffic to the main site.