What is Dark Social?
The word Dark Social is used to delineate the traffic on the website driven from the untraceable intent data source where target prospects hang out, discuss solutions through the private messaging platforms.
In 2012, Alexis C. Madrigal coined the term Dark Social, which refers to the undescriptive website traffic by marketers and search engine optimization specialists.
She said- “One dirty secret of web analytics is that the information we get is limited. There are circumstances when you show up at our doorstep and we have no idea how you got here.”
Basically, dark social refers to the “invisible” traffic coming through indirect channels such as messengers, WhatsApp, etc, where brands are not promoting directly. It happens when one visitor shares about the brand service or product to another person through the internal communication channel and that person visit the sites, but their info is not trackable. This activity forms of the referral traffic attributed to the wrong channel is called dark social.
Is Dark Social is important for your business?
To grow your SaaS, B2B marketers must consider the Dark social activity as it presents the thought process of the B2B buyers that their journey starts even before visiting the vendor’s website or communicating with them.
Reasons to consider Dark Social investment for SaaS growth are:
- Buying process
In 2022, the investment in the community channels should be the priority as the buyers in 2022 look for the customer experiences, their journey, and their reviews on various channels like LinkedIn, Slack, or Facebook groups and decide on purchasing decisions on the responses they receive. Hence, positive responses motivate the new prospects to a happy buyer.
- Product Demand generation
It helps take the advantage of word of mouth by shifting the mindset to leverage content for demand creation.
Putting information in a channelized way on a platform makes it much more attractive for the buyers.
- Category domination
Nowadays, buyers get influenced by the majority of the buyers a brand has. So using dark social is a good opportunity to influence these buyers and be the king of your own category by creating a demand for your product or services. Doing such activity can make you brand buyers’ ultimate preferred solution.
5 Tools used for Dark Social Tracking
- GetSocial
It has made it easy to add more social traffic and followers evaluating the content that has more visitors or is grabbing more limelight. Including GetSocial share and follow buttons makes the content sharing over 30+ networks for the readers easy. It also offers the engagement data a particular page is reaching.
- Google Analytics
The most preferred tool by business owners to measure analytics is Google Analytics. It has been considered the most trustable platform for the site metrics.
- AddThis
It is a social bookmarking server integrated into a website permitting site visitors to bookmark pages using platforms such as Facebook, Google Bookmarks, Pinterest, Twitter, etc improving the social sharing no.s along with the site engagements and drive conversions. A usual code is served in order to activate dark social sharing tracking.
- Po.st
These tools make content sharing easier, affecting the organic traffic positively. Along with accessing the sharing power, Po.st also performs in-depth social analysis and audience insights assisting marketers with content optimization and user acquisition.
- ShareThis
It also the sharing of the content via e-mail, AIM or text messages. It has a customization feature where analysts can track dark social records accordingly.
Dark Social Traffic vs Other Traffic Source
The visitors on the sites are driven through different channels and these sources comprise:
- Organic Search Traffic
The clicks on the search engine result pages links are called organic search traffic.
- Paid Search Traffic
The clicks on the paid advertisement listed by the marketers on different search engine results are paid search traffic.
- Referral Traffic
The clicks on the links on the third-party websites come under referral traffic. This could be blogs, press releases, directory listings redirecting the audience to the original website.
- Display Traffic
The digital display advertisement clicks such as banner ads etc are display traffic.
- Email Traffic
Clicks on the shared email campaigns are email traffic.
- Social Traffic
Clicks on the links shared on the owned social media accounts are social traffic.
- Direct Traffic
It can be from multiple sources that include URLs in the browser’s search bars, saved bookmarks, untagged links clicks, etc.
Why ‘Dark’ Places are dominating the sharing platforms?
There are multiple reasons people use dark places to share stuff they like. These are:
- Information curation is easy
The people find the information sharing on the private channels easy to curate, especially for the weighty discussions with the closest people they want.
- Sharing circle can be controlled
The dark places give more control to the people to share stuff without worrying about the judgment people will pass.
- Security to the Confidential information
In dark places, the other channels cannot access the personal information making it more likable for the people to be more sure about their confidential stuff to be secured well.
- No language bars
Communication through dark places is easy to communicate as people can converse informally, giving them more liberty for using the language they want.
Effects of Dark Social on Brands
- When the sharing of the content is done through private messaging apps, it did not leave the footprints to track the indirect source of the traffic to convert them into leads.
- This referral attribution, via direct sharing, points out the incorrectly assigned channels.
- It makes it difficult for the brands to measure the ROI because of the increasing untraceable and immeasurable traffic on the site.
- This high inaccuracy in data measurement makes it challenging to evaluate the content performance as well.
Initiatives a Brand can take about Dark Social
- Curating Content Shareable
As content is being shared in the dark place is a sign that content must be worth sharing. If the content is good and attracts the buyers’ needs, they would love to recommend it to the people. So work on the content and track the traffic.
- Use Shortened URL links
Having shortened links is unique that can be tracked hence doesn’t stay longer in the dark. These links are easy to share on social networks, emails, and websites, and shortened URLs are easy to track.
- Optimized content for multi-device friendly
Different people use different devices to consume content at their convenience, so leaving content optimization behind would be a big mistake. As per sources, 62% of clicks on the sites from the dark social area are from mobile. So making content readable for all the devices is the important and right move to do.
- Revisiting Social Sharing Buttons
Instead of making people copy and paste your URL for sharing ensure that you have included sharing social button options on your websites that can track the referral traffic.
- Use Dark Social tools
Using social tools such as GetSocial, AddThis, etc are some dark social tools that can track the copy and paste activities on the dark social channels by adding trackable codes onto a site.
Wrapping Up
Dark social is not a bugbear as it looks like but is crucial for the business. It cannot be avoided but can be curated well to extract the maximum advantages from it. How to make dark social your plus point has already been explained.
Hope this piece of information has made you learn new things that are important for your business.
Stay tuned for more insights…
