- It's easy to see how much traffic is coming
from Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn
but not every social network shows up in your analytics.
As much as 60% of your traffic might come from
what's called dark social channel,
like WhatsApp, email or SMS.
They don't share referrer information.
So they show up as direct slash non in Google analytics.
The term dark social was coined by Alexis Madrigal
at the Atlantic
where he found the majority of Atlantic social traffic
actually came from dark social.
So if we go to the article we can see
that 56.5% of their traffic was dark social
which is two and a half times the traffic of Facebook.
Word of mouth coefficient is a metric
that I helped come up with which really helps
you measure this phenomenon on your business.
It even helps you predict the future impact
on your business of dark social.
So I worked on an article
alongside Yusef and Phil my collaborators for Reforge
which showed you how to calculate this metric
for your business.
There is a template there
but I've adapted the template to make it a little simpler
for this use case
but feel free to check out that original article
and download the template for free there as well.
Now, if you go into the information tab of the template,
I've already created the segments
in Google analytics for you to use.
And the way that you import them is
when you're logged into Google analytics,
click on them
and then select the view that you want
and then hit Create.
And then that's going to create the segment
in your analytics.
If you do that for each one of these
then you'll be able to download the data.
So just going to show you what this looks like
once you've created the segments
and then you've added the segments here
you can click on them and hit Apply.
And I'll walk you through what the different segments mean.
So the first segment here is the word of mouth coefficient,
new brand search users,
that is when someone is a new visitor to your website,
but they're searching for your brand terms.
So they've landed on the homepage
and they've come through Google organic.
So it's important to separate out brand search users
specifically from other types of SEO for the analysis.
The next one is direct visitors.
So these are new direct visitors.
These are people who came to your website.
Hadn't been to the website before
but they came through direct non
meaning that they were part of the dark social traffic.
Then finally, number of returning users,
we found that the number of returning visitors
was highly predictive of new direct users.
So the word of mouth coefficient is really just figuring out
how much direct traffic you got
as a function of your returning users.
We find that the more returning users you get
the more referrals you get
and therefore the more direct traffic you get
from social media.
So once you have all of this applied,
you just want to go here to export
and then you can export as a CSV
and then you'll have the data to fill in the template.
Once you've got the data, if you go to raw
then this is where you paste in the data.
And just make sure
that the columns lined up and there's no issues.
The data should be pasted in like this.
And you see it's split out by segment,
but also date range.
And you want to do weekly data here.
Now, what this does is it finds the week
and the week number
and that's used for the analysis as well.
So once you paste that in,
if you go to daily template
this is already done the analysis for you.
So this is where your data is showing up
in this pivot table.
And then we do some magic to calculate
the word of mouth coefficient.
And then it shows up in these two charts at the top.
So what this means, first of all on the left,
the green is your word of mouth coefficient.
This is the ratio of new users coming through direct,
the dark social traffic,
plus new users coming to your brand,
which we're also lumping in with dark social.
And then we're dividing that
by the number of returning users.
So you can see
that this is a pretty stable metric over time.
Although for this brand
you can see over time, it is declining.
You can see that it's actually even stable
when we saw a huge increase in visitors
which says to me that this is a real phenomenon.
This is something that actually exists.
If you get more returning visitors
you are just going to get more referrals
and more dark social,
and you can see on the right here
this is the correlation analysis.
So you can see that what we did have a lot
of returning plus non word of mouth, new users.
We are also getting
a lot of new word of mouth users as well.
And the correlation is very high for this website.
It's 0.96.
You might have to play around
with the different definitions.
And you know, the article talks a little bit more
about that in detail,
how to make this template more advanced
and handle different use cases
if your business is a little bit more complex than this one.
But it should really give you an idea of how this works.
If you can predict word of mouth coefficient.
If you can predict how much traffic you're going to get
from dark social in the future,
based on the number of returning users,
then you can project that forward
and it really helps you figure out
what your ROI is going to be
and where your ROI has been coming from historically.
With this template for measuring
and predicting word of mouth.
Now you can really understand how dark social
impacts your business, and you can see the results
of any changes you made to increase virality.