While the heading and the term ‘dark social’ may sound ominous it isn’t a bad as it sounds. It is something you need to be aware if you’re interested in accurately tracking the traffic to your website and your online published content.
In a nutshell – dark social is a circumstance when, rather than clicking on a link directly, readers will copy and paste your link into their browser or paste into an email, text message or instant message and send it. When shared this is why you lose track of how much traffic you are getting and how many shares you are getting because it’s all happening in the dark.
Why is dark social a problem? When readers do this ‘dark social’ method you analytics have trouble understanding where the traffic has come from. And 69% of all content sharing happens on dark social. 93% of people use dark social channels (so chances are you’ve done it yourself) and a huge 32% of people ONLY share via dark social – that’s a lot of tracking information staying in the dark.
Ways to get around dark social:
• Informing your readers – In social media posts ask them to ‘click on the link’.
• Helping them share – include widgets, plugins and buttons that allow your readers to share via email and social media platforms at the click of a mouse or tap of a screen.
• Accessible links – on your website, in email newsletter campaigns, direct emails, on social media and anywhere us you make reference to your online content, include a link that will automatically redirect, don’t make your readers go searching for the information you are referring to.
• Shorten – there a two benefits to using a shortened link for your content. They are shorter, obviously, and look neater and more attractive. And if you use a link shortening service (Bitly is a good one) than you will have access to all kinds of click data, regardless of where/how the link is shared.
Knowing where your website traffic is coming from will help you to build a clearer picture of where your readers are reading, what type of content resonates with them, geographically where they are, when they are reading your content, and to a certain extent, who they are.
Don’t lose valuable information on your readers – consider dark social and the steps you can take to minimise the damage.
If you need help creating content, setting and managing social media profiles or even just adding social media and share buttons to your blog or website, contact the team at Website Design Centre today.
