Lets Talk About Dark Traffic
I have spoken before about the importance of looks at analytics from different sources. After the last batch of Twitter API updates, there was one very important but mostly unnoticed error. The API stopped reporting clicks from anything other than twitter.com. This meant that the only time Twitter was reporting a click in Twitter Analytics or Google Analytics, was if someone clicked a tweet directly from Twitter.com. 80% of people use a mobile app like hootsuite, tweetdeck or even Twitter mobile. Those clicks were not tracking at all in Twitter Analytics and were showing up as dark traffic through a link shortner.
Lets talk about what dark traffic is. Dark traffic is traffic that cannot be directly tracked to a site. This usually means third party applications, email, and messenger programs. In Bitly (link shortners), if it doesnt come from a social network, it shows up as dark traffic. In Google Analytics, dark traffic equates as a direct hit. So you are still gettting the traffic, just you don't know that it is actually coming from Twitter.
It may not sound like a big deal, unless you are trying to gauge how successful your twitter marketing efforts really are. Then your numbers might be way off. For instance, the other day I discovered out of 74 clicks, 72 were dark. GA said twitter only sent 2 hits. Its a pretty big skew.
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CW7mLSmWYAEE9aw.png:large
It looks like Twitter is fixing the issue. But this shows the importance of tracking with different methods. 1 analytics is not enough to give you a full picture.
Comments
thanks for the nfo
yes, this is such a pain for reports and social traffic tracking... ugh