Dark social: The biggest missed opportunity in marketing
‘ResearchToday!’ is a research seminar series that shows the width of research in the Business School, and is a forum to foster the collaboration and exchangeAbout this event
| Event Name | Dark social: The biggest missed opportunity in marketing |
|---|---|
| Start Date | Mar 14, 2019 12:00 pm |
| End Date | Mar 14, 2019 1:00 pm |
| Duration | 1 hour |
| Description | Interested guests are always welcome, from within or outside of the university! No registration is needed if you are internal, please just join us. If you are external to the University, please just send us an email to let us know you will be joining us, and we will inform our reception desk to expect you. Contact and further information: Research Manager for the School of Business, email: busresearch@lsbu.ac.uk This week's seminar presentation will be given by Ammarah Marjan, PhD student in the School of Business. To give you a taste of the session, a brief abstract can be found below: Following widespread adoption of closed social media apps, marketers can no longer easily track outbound sharing of website links, or inbound traffic resulting from those shares – so-called Dark Social. This social traffic is misclassified in Google Analytics as Direct, and little is currently known about its volume or relative behaviour. The aim of this study was to contextualise the typical contribution of the direct channel to total website reach, identify the relative contribution of (true) direct traffic and estimate its dark social volume. Traffic flows totalling over 3 million hits were observed over two years on five websites. We find that the direct channel can contribute over a third of total traffic and estimate an inbound dark social component of about half. These important volumes are little understood at present, and we describe a future research agenda to develop theory. Ammarah's PhD is co-sponsored by Brandmovers Institute of Digital and Creative Economy. |