On Monday October 7th we are launching an update with improvements to how direct and dark social traffic are attributed.
Direct/Bookmark new traffic source
We are adding a new traffic source under direct traffic: bookmark. This category will receive traffic from direct/direct and social/dark social sources from deep links that are not articles Content Type = Not Editorial.
With this category, we want to give visibility of URLs that users are saving (such as sports scores pages or stock market charts), or that are visited multiple times and the browser starts to recommend.
Dark social traffic from Desktop
Currently, there are many applications on the desktop that are sending traffic to articles without attribution (Slack, Teams, etc.). Until today, all desktop direct traffic to articles was considered direct. From now on we will consider that traffic dark social.
Long sessions will keep the initial source
Until today, when a user kept a tab open in the background for a few days, when he came back the session changed resulting in users having the publisher’s own domain as a traffic source. In rare occasions, this could happen too when the user navigates before the the Marfeel code loads. From now on, these users will retain their original traffic source.