Facebook Is To Blame For A Huge Proportion Of 'Dark Traffic' Swamping The Web, But It's Working On A Fix, Flickr CC/Christopher "Dark social" could become less of a problem as Facebook is working on a fix. So-called "dark traffic" is a huge problem for publishers and website owners.
It's useful to be able to look at your analytics, but when a huge proportion of referral traffic is listed as "direct" (and aside from a homepage, it's very unlikely users are typing full URLs into their browser to go directly to a page) it's difficult to know where to focus to boost your audience.
Now new research from the analytics firm Chartbeat, as well as confirmation from major publishers, shows that Facebook's mobile apps are largely responsible for the swathes of dark traffic being directed toward websites. We already knew Facebook was the principal source of social referral traffic for most digital publishers. But Facebook has been underselling itself.
Fortunately for publishers and website owners, it appears that Facebook is working on a fix.
The term "dark social" was coined by Alexis C. Madrigal, a senior editor at The Atlantic, who found that more than half of the website’s referral traffic was seemingly untraceable. Dark traffic refers mostly to when links have been shared via an online chat, email, or app rather than through a browser or a specific social app through which referrals can be easily tracked. Chartbeat has found in some cases dark social account for 65% of a website's traffic, averaging at about a third across its network.
Most analytics platforms (Google Analytics, Adobe Omniture, Chartbeat) have a huge section in their reports called "direct," which counts all those apps that users use to click on links "direct to a site." Facebook is one of them — alongside sources like Reddit, Gmail, and IM apps. Twitter, on the other hand, has a special "t.co" URL shortener, which means Twitter referrals are always easily trackable.
The problem with Facebook not using a shortener like this is that a huge proportion of its users access the site via only the mobile app. We know 703 million people visit the site via their mobiles daily, and presumably the majority of those do so via the app. That's a massive wave of referral traffic going unidentified.
Chartbeat, which this week began tracking Facebook users more effectively using a different method (more on that later), has published a blog post that clearly marks out the Facebook/dark social impact.
Last month the analytics company began to look at time series data for specific articles to identify patterns in traffic and correlate that with the "dark social" number.
Take a look at the chart below. The dark traffic spikes at the same time the article began going big on Reddit, and then again when it started picking up pace on Facebook.Madrigal wrote in a new blog post published this week that he too conducted a test earlier this year. He set up an Atlantic post "deep in the sand of time" so only people who were part of the test would find it. He then posted a link to the story on his Facebook page and told his friends to click to it only if they were using the mobile app. He then looked at the referrers (of which he knew 100% were coming from Facebook). A smattering of people showed up on his Adobe Omniture analytics report as coming from Facebook.com, but the rest showed up as "type/bookmarked."
