Dark Traffic, Zero-Click Attribution, and How to Fix Your Marketing Reporting

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Maybe you’ve noticed this. There was a time when companies could reasonably expect to see where most of their traffic and sales were coming from, allowing them to refine their campaigns to focus on those areas. But in recent years, attribution seems to have grown less and less accurate. So, what gives?

The problem can be traced back to two related issues: Dark traffic and zero-click attribution. If you’re not familiar with those terms, don’t worry — we’ll explore what both of those things are later on the page. In total, we’ll cover the following topics:

What is dark traffic?
What is zero-click attribution?
Why are these issues happening?
What to do about dark traffic
What to do about zero-click attribution
Read on to find out more. And to get more digital dentist database info sent straight to your inbox, be sure to subscribe to Revenue Weekly, our email newsletter!

What is dark traffic?
Dark traffic is a type of direct traffic that doesn’t have a clear origin.

If you don’t know what direct traffic is, it’s traffic that (in theory) comes from users directly typing a URL into the search bar and heading straight to your site, rather than clicking on a link somewhere. But in reality, a lot of the traffic that reporting tools like Google Analytics ascribe to direct traffic actually comes from somewhere else.

Those reporting tools may not know where your site traffic is coming from. In those cases, they’ll often just categorize it as direct traffic by default. But that heavily skews your attribution, which is a big problem.

What is zero-click attribution?
Zero-click attribution is the process of attempting to attribute marketing results to searches where users don’t click on anything. These are called zero-click searches, and they’ve grown more and more common over the years.

Your web content can still influence users if they see it in zero-click searches, and it may still drive results for you down the line. But you have no way of knowing that, because without clicks, there’s no trackable connection between those searches and the results they lead to. Naturally, that throws off your reporting.

Why are these issues happening?
There are several different reasons for the uptick in dark traffic and zero-click searches. Firstly, it’s important to realize that attribution depends on data tracking. But data tracking has grown more and more restricted due to things like:

Data privacy laws
Widespread use of adblockers
Increased shift from web browsers to apps
Those and other factors have made it increasingly difficult for businesses to track user activity, which hurts their attribution.

There’s also the impact of zero-click searches. So, what causes those searches? Ultimately, it’s the fact that search engines and other platforms don’t really want people to click on links. They want them to stay there, on their platform. So, you get things like search engine results page (SERP) features from Google.

These features aim to answer user queries right there in the search results, negating the need for users to click on any of the ranking pages. Of course, most of these SERP features still draw from external website content, and even credit the sites they pull from.

So, it’s not that you can’t still impact user behavior through zero-click searches. It’s just that if you do, you’ll have no way of tracking it.

What to do about dark traffic
We’ve explored the trouble with dark traffic, as well as what causes it. Now let’s talk about a few of the things you can do to navigate this issue, including:

Use UTM codes
Block your company’s IP addresses
Segment your direct traffic reporting
Keep reading for more info.

Use UTM codes
One way to decrease your dark traffic is to make it easier for your reporting tools to identify traffic from some of your different marketing materials like emails, social media posts, and so on. To do that, you can add UTM codes to all the website links you include in those materials.

UTM codes insert additional parameters to the traffic coming from these channels, giving them a higher chance of being accurately recognized and attributed in your reporting.

Block your company’s IP addresses
Another issue that may be affecting your dark traffic attribution is that your own marketing and web design teams visit a lot of the pages on your site as part of their day-to-day jobs. You don’t want to track this traffic, since it’s not actually contributing to any leads or revenue.

To address this issue, you can simply block your company’s IP address (or addresses, if you have more than one) in your reporting tools. That way, site visits from within your company won’t be tracked at all.