Dark Social

Your friends call you a Facebook pro. And everyone knows that tweeting gives your heavenly pleasure. Besides, you have a website which lists out funny things. All your friends and their friends’ visit your site at least once in a day. Analysts envy the visitor statistics of your site. Google search always list your site in the No. 1 position. And market investors estimated your site is worth a few millions based on the eyeballs it attracts. Every day is a fun day for you! And you are light speeding your way in to the billionaire’s league. Then… suddenly something happened! 

Your website eyeball count started crashing. Your website analytics are not reflecting the actual statistics. Market investors are dragging down your million dollars’ worth! What is happening?

You force exit of your dream world, enters real-world, sit before your system, and starts going through the visitor analytics statistics. While trying to understand why suddenly visitors are not coming to your site, you would like to know more about your influencer websites who used to direct traffic to your site and would like to check whether they are doing the same thing even now! But, alas! What you find? Most [60%] of the URLs are without UTM parameters and they are all bucketed under ‘Direct Traffic’. 

Where from this direct traffic is coming? There is no origin; seems like that the links have been shared between visitors through some private means like emails, WhatsApp, Snapchat, etc. There is no chance to find out the referral source. All these direct traffic URLs falls under Dark Social. 

There is no way to decode Dark Social… And there is no way to find why the traffic to your site has come down abruptly now!