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I’ve been looking forward to sitting in on Annalise Kaylor‘s session on Demystifying “Dark Social” to Reveal Your Hidden Site Statistics because, honestly, I’m not entirely sure what dark social means.
Only a few people raised their hands to show that they know what dark social means, so I’m in good company not understanding any of this yet.
What is Dark Social?
Someone (Alexis Madrigal) discovered that his Google Analytics information didn’t match up with what everything else was showing. There is a lot of “direct traffic” that is basically a mystery to most of us. Direct traffic is any website traffic recorded that does not have any referral information attached.
Dark Social is focused on figuring out where all that traffic is coming from.
Why Should I care?
Because you may be misappropriating as much as 70% of your traffic. You may only have 1,000 followers, but they may be an amazing 1,000 followers who share your content with THEIR networks. What isn’t showing up with referrer stats?
- Native mobile apps (like Facebook apps, Instagram apps, etc,)
- Email (for when you want your
- Chat (all those links my husband and I have shared over IM during the work day)
- Secure browsing (clicking over from an https site to your http blog)
- Organic search (in some browsers)
When you have a really epic blog post, create a Facebook ad and target journalists with it! (This is totally what I should have done with my post about the NYS health exchanges.) Annalise did this for a post about that time Delta told her she didn’t look “disabled enough” to bring her service dog on a plane. (The cringe-worthy “Oooo” spread throughout the room.) She got over a million hits to that post over a week or two.
Google URL Builder
Annalise will share her sides about this later so we can refer to the screenshots. She likes Google URL Builder so you don’t have to go back and forth between analytic tools. Make a simple URL for each channel you share on. That’s generally where you see things like “?utm_source=fb” when you click through to articles from Facebook.
Use Google URL Builder for A/B testing to see what works better for your posts. You can use “Facebook1” and “Facebook2” to try a link campaign one day and then a photo post the next day to see which performs better.
This gives you a lot more data to share with brands you want to work with or who want to work with you.
Keep your URL conventions consistent so your data looks clean. Most people will share links by copy/paste, so make sure you have all that data in your URLs.
You may learn from this dark social data that you are not focusing your efforts on the right social networks. You may learn that your hidden dark social referral data paints an entirely different picture of which platform really sends you the most traffic.
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In the End
Reconcile all of this data annually. Look at your Facebook Insights vs Google Analytics and see what data is missing. Your traffic source tags can help you determine where some (but not all) or your “direct traffic” is coming from and understand your audience better. Then you can refocus your promotional efforts on where your people are.
That’s me: Christina Gleason. I’m a writer, editor, and disability advocate. I'm a multiply disabled autistic lady doing my best in this world built for abled people. I’m a geek for grammar, fantasy, and casual gaming. I hate vegetables. I cannot reliably speak, so I’ll happily conduct business over email or messaging instead.
