Content Strategy: Your Eyes in the Dark Web World

The mysterious presence of “dark social” sparked a lot of discussion about the shortcomings of tracking traffic and how we share and spread content outside the reach of traditional analytics.

For The Atlantic, more than half of social traffic may be coming from unknown sources, while about 22% comes from Facebook and about 11% from Twitter. An analysis of a broader set of media publishers show nearly 70% of social traffic falls under the dark category. The dirty secret of analytics is that most traffic sources are currently untraceable.

A year ago, Google began encrypting searches for signed-in users, so that the terms they searched for were no longer passed to publishers, except for advertisers.

The search engine is withholding from webmasters queries that reveal personal needs, motivations and identifiers. Google initially predicted that most websites would see single digit percentages of traffic under the “not provided” designation, however some sites see half their traffic hidden in Google Analytics.

A chat between Vikas Gulati from Vserv.mobi and Sanchit Sanga from Mindshare is recorded on video. Their convo explores the role of content and content strategy in marketing and effective attribution techniques.

B2Bento.tv – Marketing at Crossroads Part 3: Why Content is Key and Who Takes Credit from B2Bento on Vimeo.

So, when  search marketers look at the big picture, where our search traffic data is obscured by Google, where much of social sharing is cloaked by darkness, there really is only one effective strategy: focusing on content. Every medium plays a role in what these speakers call the “surround sound” effect of marketing. The best way to direct your marketing efforts is to understand your consumer and use that to guide your content strategy.