Analyzing Web Traffic: Measuring Online User Engagement Gets Tougher

By David Tobia
October 18, 2012

While Web companies have become obsessed with tracking Facebook and Twitter for traffic, Alexis Madrigal of The Atlantic argues that most traffic for many sites still comes through “dark social” sources like email and chat messages.
When tracking programs show that traffic comes through “direct” or “typed/bookmarked,” it suggests users actually typed the URL into the browser. But many times, argues Madrigal, the traffic actually comes through a chat message or an email from a friend.
Chartbeat, which provides analytics for publishers, breaks down the “direct” category into sub-categories. When analyzing The Atlantic website, for example, Chartbeat found that 60 percent of social traffic comes from these “dark” or hard to track social sources.
The data suggests that many websites see close to 70 percent traffic from hard to track social sources.
“This problem is compounded by the shift to mobile content consumption, since chat apps and instant messaging and other direct communication methods are even more prevalent in the mobile world than on the desktop,” writes GigaOM. “Links are passed from social network to apps to chat to email, and tracking them quite quickly becomes almost impossible.”
One way to optimize page views is to follow the model of “content is king,” explains Madrigal. Since most traffic comes through person-to-person referrals, then simply writing interesting pieces should spark sharing.

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