“Dark Social” is like digital word of mouth. Coined in 2012 by Alexis Madrigal , a former deputy editor at The Atlantic , the term describes inbound traffic that’s hard to trace by virtue of its source. Dark social usually appears in your analytics as direct traffic. It looks like someone entered the website’s main page or one of its larger subpages, like TheAtlantic.com or TheAtlantic.com/Politics, straight into their browser’s nav bar. At the time of Madrigal’s piece, Dark Social was said to account for 56.5% of The Atlantic’ s traffic, which made both the publication and digital marketers take notice.
Dark Social includes text messages, email, encrypted chat apps like Signal and Telegram, mobile apps like Reddit, gaming systems like Playstation, etc. The reason why word-of-mouth is such an apt comparison is that the link is usually just copied and pasted directly into a more private medium of conversation, and then sent to someone as close as a friend or family member or as distant as a stranger in-game.
What is the impact of dark social?
Dark social is less frequently called direct social or dark traffic. It’s not to be confused with the dark web or deep web. Dark…
