How To Identify And Deal With Dark Traffic - Jain Technosoft Every online marketer needs to be aware of the dark side of Google Analytics, which is ‘dark traffic’. However, it is hard to identify it as it lies deep under the layers of thousands of marketing activities taking place every second. Most of the online marketing efforts are aimed at increasing traffic on a website – through direct referrals, and through diverted traffic from ads.
Generally, a website requires 10-20% of its entire traffic through direct referrals, or else it is considered to have a poor reach. On the other hand, if the incoming traffic through direct referrals is very high, then the website can be considered to have dark traffic, which is the incoming traffic that arrives from an unidentified URL. The root source of such traffic may not be tracked because this traffic lacks proper referrer string of the original source. There are various sources that bring dark traffic like mobile apps, emails, and secured sites. Traffic coming in through mobile apps like Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, and Hangouts does not show up as app referral as most of the apps use in-app browsers which cannot be tracked. Also, the URLs shared in email don’t have the sourced data, and the source data tailed to the traffic coming from secured HTTPS sites is lost. Even though these sources are known, an online marketer may not be certain about each and every direct visit to the website. They may not be sure whether a user has landed by entering the URL or by accessing a bookmark. With the