Dark Social's False Attribution to 'Direct' Traffic

Marketing School - Digital Marketing and Online Marketing Tips

Eric Siu and Neil Patel

Business, Marketing, Careers

4.6 • 1.4K Ratings

🗓️ 30 November 2023

⏱️ 6 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In episode #2622, We discuss the challenges of accurately tracking web traffic in the age of dark social. We highlight the misclassification of social referral traffic as direct and the impact it has on us marketers and website owners. With the rise of privacy concerns and the decline in tracking consent, traditional analytics platforms like Google Analytics are becoming less reliable. We emphasize the need for us marketers to invest in brand recall studies and qualitative data to better understand where our visitors and buyers are coming from. Don’t forget to help us grow by subscribing and liking on YouTube! Check out more of Eric’s content (Leveling UP YT) and Neil’s videos (Neil Patel YT) TIME-STAMPED SHOW NOTES: (00:00) Today’s topic: Dark Social's False Attribution to 'Direct' Traffic (00:40) Misclassification of social referral traffic as direct traffic (01:38) Explanation of dark social and its attribution challenges (02:03) Increasing privacy concerns and its effect on tracking web traffic (02:54) Shift towards traditional marketing models and multitouch attribution (03:45) Strategies to capture qualitative data and attribute leads (04:17) Importance of investing in brand recall studies (04:23) Difficulty in analyzing data with Google Analytics (05:23) Use of custom reports and daily dashboards for analytics (05:46) That’s it for today! Don’t forget to rate, review, and subscribe! Go to https://www.marketingschool.io to learn more! Links Mentioned in Today’s Episode: Rand Fishkin Blog Leave Some Feedback: What should we talk about next? Please let us know in the comments below Did you enjoy this episode? If so, please leave a short review. Connect with Us: Single Grain << Eric’s ad agency NP Digital << Neil’s ad agency X @neilpatel X @ericosiu Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Transcript

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0:00.0	All right, so we're going to talk about how Dark Social falsely attributes significant percentage of web traffic as direct.
0:07.0	So this is a post from Ran Fischkin, so he formerly he founded Maiz, he's the founder, one of the co-founders of Spark Toro.
0:13.8	And so Ran Fishkin over here, you can see on the Spark Toro blog.
0:16.6	So he basically says at a high level that, actually I'm gonna pull, I going to go all the way down here so
0:24.9	takeaways I'm going to go to takeaways over here so takeaways if you are a
0:28.7	marketer or website owner relying on analytics platforms Google Analytics Analytics or anything else, to provide accurate
0:33.9	comprehensive information about where your visitors came from and how they found your website,
0:38.4	we recommend revisiting those assumptions. A substantial portion of social traffic referral
0:44.0	social referral traffic comes without proper accurate referral data
0:47.4	and is misclassified as direct.
0:49.7	If you're attributing all direct visits to type in visitors, email, text message, offline
0:53.5	brand campaigns or dark search because of dark social, you're almost certainly under counting
0:58.2	the impact of social media marketing, social referrals, and word of mouth networks.
1:02.1	Now let me call out one more thing real quick before we move on here.
1:04.6	So in this graph up here, you can see the results at a glance.
1:09.2	You can see basically 100% of Tik-Tok traffic is attributed to direct.
1:15.0	Same with Slack, same with Discord,
1:16.9	same with Mastodon, if anybody uses that.
1:19.4	What's app is 100% as well, Facebook Messenger 75% and at Instagram is about 30% or so. So let me explain
1:26.6	dark social really quick and then Neil you can give your reaction. So dark social
1:30.2	basically just means it's like the social media post that you post and you're basically not able. social basically
1:34.0	not able to attribute it, which is why it's called dark.
	...

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