Dark Social Metrics – What You Should Know about it and How to Measure it?

Any social media program should have accompanying social media metrics.

There’s no way you can figure out where your hard work is making its mark (and where you may need to shift your efforts) if you don’t have analytics that help you.

But typical analytics may not tell the whole story of what’s going on with your social media. That’s because there’s a portion of your social media work that’s not exactly straightforward in its reporting.

Called dark social, these metrics are simply traffic that you can’t pin down the exact source. It might be from any number of places—from native social media apps, from email, from URLs that are sent via a messaging app, for example.

So there’s nothing nefarious about these metrics; they’re just not easy to determine the origin, which can throw traditional analytics into disarray if they’re not considered appropriately.

In fact, most people don’t even know that they’re contributing to dark social—it’s something you have to dig into.

Actually, if you look at the numbers, dark social accounts for much more of the traffic than many businesses probably assume—up to 70 percent of it.

So not only do you have to track it correctly, but you have to figure out how to use your content strategically to meet the needs of those dark social users.

Dark Social Metrics – What You Need to Know About it?

Dark Social Metrics can be a significant amount of traffic and without measuring it, you might just be basing your decisions on factors that have a very less actual impact on your overall returns.

But the question is how do you measure it, if you don’t even know which channels are bringing this traffic?

One of the simplest ways to begin tracking the dark social metrics is to utilize the power of Google Analytics.

There are easy steps to take to do that—you just have to know them. They include using some filters and testing and monitoring correctly too.

There is this and much more to know about dark social metrics. And this dark social metrics graphic explains the concept and how to understand it in a simple and digestible format.