“Dark Social” media took the web by storm this week, unveiling to many the shadows in measuring your social media impact. This accounts for the majority of your traffic and yet lives untraced where standard metrics fear to tread (or simply cannot) — places like email and instant messaging.
Alexis Madrigal, senior editor of The Atlantic, proposed last week in a post:
“The sharing you see on sites like Facebook and Twitter is the tip of the ‘social’ iceberg. We are impressed by its scale because it’s easy to measure. But most sharing is done via dark social means like email and IM that are difficult to measure.”
Discussion of performance metrics at NASA during the Federal SocialGov Summit in September.
Photo by Justin Herman, GSA
It’s true. Too often it’s the harder-to-find and more nuanced metrics that best tell the story of your program.
Our office maintains a number of email listservs, internal ideation platforms, and yes, traditional social media channels. Much of this content was lumped in one broad and undefined metric: direct traffic.
We knew there was more to the story.
On one side, the conversions reported from URL shorteners were far greater than what was reported as social traffic on our basic web analytics tools.
On the other side was a heap of undefined direct traffic treated as if it came out of nowhere.
A basic solution I call the “social string approach” can help any agency cast light on this hidden world that drives our social media performance. It is surprisingly simple and freely available to agencies:
1. Define a test period to accurately monitor. How often do you do post content on social media, and on how many channels? The more complex your strategic operations the more time you want to dedicate to testing. Our teams often contribute to listservs and other channels once a week, so we set our test period at three weeks in order to collect a meaningful sample.
2. Create tracking URLs. Many agencies already use Go.USA.gov to shorten their URLs and track conversions, but we’re taking it a step farther. Social string approach asks you to split that conversion metric into more targeted brackets, with a different tracking link for every form of social and dark social you engage in:
One for Facebook, one for Twitter, one that sits on your video channel description, one for external email (like a listserv), one for each internal email and sharing among colleagues.
As a result, you can monitor the strings of engagement that impact your performance outcomes.
3. Monitor and report the conversions for each URL. You’re looking at one piece of content, but you’re tracking the individual performance of all the ways you launched it into the social space.
Is the content you’re sending to one list of 20 people getting more than 400 conversions on average, so what looks like limited engagement is really an important social contributor?
Watch and find out.
4. Compare the ratios between performance for each channel with metrics like Direct Traffic. No tool is perfect and they’ll rarely match up, but you can adjust based on overall trends identified across the board. This is where the analysis of metrics comes in and not just reporting.
5. Adjust your social media strategies and periodically repeat process to spot trends. As always, use your findings to revise your strategies — and chances are, the outcome of this exercise will make you want to rethink and adjust.
Then start the process again to gauge its effectiveness and evolve with your customers.
Also, as Mathew Ingram highlights in a follow-up post:
“The only real way to optimize for social spread is in the nature of the content itself. There’s no way to game email or people’s instant messages. There’s no power users you can contact. There’s no algorithms to understand.”
Understanding nuances, like what drives direct traffic, is a challenge we’ve long noticed in our ongoing efforts to improve our web performance metrics, most recently reflected in the release of Digital Metrics for Federal Agencies on HowTo.gov.
We look forward to discussing dark social and government strategy more during our weekly office hours for feds via Google Hangout, and on the #SocialGov hashtag.
For more information, follow the Federal Social Media Community of Practice and its 12-agency Social Media Performance Metrics Working Group.
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8 comments
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October 29, 2012 at 5:55 pm (UTC -5 )
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Ejaz Alam says:
October 25, 2012 at 8:29 am (UTC -5 )
Social media’s impact is getting over emphasized these days. While lot of internet marketers pursue extensive use of social media and now Google also gives heavy weight age to it. However this channel is also getting manipulated so measuring it truly is also getting complex. Anyway nice piece of information, good luck and regards.
Justin Herman says:
October 25, 2012 at 9:25 am (UTC -5 )
I think that Social Media’s impact is over emphasized when people do look at it in a purely marketing sense, then apply inflated metrics that don’t directly tie to strategic goals. Which is why we strive to do the opposite.
Ejaz Alam says:
October 27, 2012 at 8:41 am (UTC -5 )
I agree with you Herman but as you said that sharing through dark social which incl email and IM is surely difficult to measure but that is most effective one as it seems more pure. Anyhow thanks for your reply, regards and good luck to you.
Ernesto Gluecksmann says:
October 24, 2012 at 5:17 pm (UTC -5 )
Marketing automation uses a lot of these techniques so a good spot is to consider using a CRM as a central tracking tool.
Justin Herman says:
October 25, 2012 at 9:23 am (UTC -5 )
We’re looking into that Ernesto — thanks!
Scott Horvath says:
October 22, 2012 at 10:00 am (UTC -5 )
In reality I think this is pretty common sense that a good majority of traffic comes from “direct traffic” (email, IM, unaccounted for services, etc). Makes sense.
However, the trick to a multi-faceted outreach effort in order to track all the different referrers implies a couple of things that most agencies don’t have:
1. A centralized method that every piece of external content goes through.
2. A tool, or limited number of allowed people, who can post content and follow strict rules for adding link in content based on the service they use.
For example, it would mean anytime someone posts a message to a LISTSERV…every single link would have to append something like “from=listserv” in the URL. And if you posted to multiple lists, then each link would have to account for the specific list like “from=listserv-gsa”
For something like Twitter, you’d have to have every link appended with something similar (ex : “from=twitter-usgsa”).
Same thing for any other service or tool. Now just think about how much effort would be involved in getting an agency to do that consistently for every tool, service, etc. What if you did a Google Hangout, or live chat, or even casual IM…you’d have to be cognizant of every link you post that goes to your site if you really wanted to capture all of those stats. It would be a nightmare.
The other option would to be to have something sitting in between any post, tweet, IM, email, etc that…on the fly…modified any URL using some sort of link testing, to include a specialized URL parameter to make it easier to track in your analytics. But I’m not quite sure how you’d even go about doing that.
Bottom line is that there’s also going to be a level of traffic that doesn’t get measure accurately, or that is full of unknowns because there’s simply no easy of tracking it all right now.
Justin Herman says:
October 22, 2012 at 10:24 am (UTC -5 )
Thanks Scott — you’ve obviously got a handle on this. Right now we’re testing out our dark social by creating separate tagged URLs through Go.USA.gov for listservs and traditional social. More time consuming? Yes. But if we periodically do this, trends will become easier to spot — and eventually, an easier solution will come along.