“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…
