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Rand Fishkin
@randfish
Co-founder , husband to , author of Lost & Founder. My Twitter account doesn't reply but mastodon.social/@randfish does
Seattle, WAsparktoro.comBorn July 10Joined June 2007

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Best way to sell something - don't sell anything. Earn the awareness, respect, & trust of those who might buy.
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Useful and great study about “dark social” traffic in analytics. Awesome job 👌
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NEW research: sparktoro.com/blog/new-resea How bad is the "Dark Social" problem? To find out, we worked with @StevejLamar on an experiment across 11 social networks and 16 types of referrals, measuring how much traffic these networks send without correction attribution.
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AMAZING. I was fighting to justify attributing a slice of direct traffic to 'dark social' a DECADE AGO. There's never been good (public) data to make the case on how much accepting GA data under-attributes value to social channels.
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76% of our traffic comes from Direct?! But only 29% lands on the homepage? WTF? We just published new research that sheds light on this dark traffic: sparktoro.com/blog/new-resea, summarized in these 4 slides 👇
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It remains positively wild to me that so much interest and attention goes into tracking attribution when the real numbers are so obscured.
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76% of our traffic comes from Direct?! But only 29% lands on the homepage? WTF? We just published new research that sheds light on this dark traffic: sparktoro.com/blog/new-resea, summarized in these 4 slides 👇
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Related - this graphic from ROIvenue.com Baseline: Last-click attribution GA4: Looks like it's giving Google Organic EVEN more attribution than the Universal GA models (b/c organic search is what usually happens after folks hear about your brand/site elsewhere)
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Even I'll admit to being biased by Big Journalism's incessant pessimism. Had no idea that Biden was, by the metrics, the US President with the best economic performance of the last 70 years. I suspect very few people will believe the truth, though. Via archive.is/lKp3J
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Fascinating to see how much of social referral traffic is misattributed. To test, researchers cleverly supplied unique URLs. Each page used a unique identifier in the URL to indicate a particular network and traffic type.
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NEW research: sparktoro.com/blog/new-resea How bad is the "Dark Social" problem? To find out, we worked with @StevejLamar on an experiment across 11 social networks and 16 types of referrals, measuring how much traffic these networks send without correction attribution.
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Finding a way to accurately measure the impact of "Dark Social" will be the next great evolution of attribution modeling. If you care about the effectiveness of your marketing, watch this area closely.
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NEW research: sparktoro.com/blog/new-resea How bad is the "Dark Social" problem? To find out, we worked with @StevejLamar on an experiment across 11 social networks and 16 types of referrals, measuring how much traffic these networks send without correction attribution.
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Mike Masnick's recent post on Twitter diaspora alternatives is worth a read: techdirt.com/2023/04/28/six and covers a lot of this
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Awesome research on attribution. Thank you !
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NEW research: sparktoro.com/blog/new-resea How bad is the "Dark Social" problem? To find out, we worked with @StevejLamar on an experiment across 11 social networks and 16 types of referrals, measuring how much traffic these networks send without correction attribution.
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Thank you for doing this research - really useful and interesting data. I'm most confused by the ones that are in the 30-75% range - I kinda understand obfuscating or not obfuscating, but that just seems an odd product decision.
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NEW research: sparktoro.com/blog/new-resea How bad is the "Dark Social" problem? To find out, we worked with @StevejLamar on an experiment across 11 social networks and 16 types of referrals, measuring how much traffic these networks send without correction attribution.
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A substantial portion of social referral traffic is misclassified as "direct", as it comes without proper, accurate referral data. Very useful research to re-rhink our analytics data👇🏼 #GA4 #SEO #SMM
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NEW research: sparktoro.com/blog/new-resea How bad is the "Dark Social" problem? To find out, we worked with @StevejLamar on an experiment across 11 social networks and 16 types of referrals, measuring how much traffic these networks send without correction attribution.
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If you're using one of those "new," "AI-powered" SEO tools, y'might wanna beware 👇 😅
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Replying to @randfish
Truly infuriating & the keyword search volume + intent stuff is killing me. It doesn't have the ability to pull search volumes or research + identify true intent, it's just parroting SEO text it's seen. Anyone not believe this? Run your prompt 2+times!
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The best marketing launches get amplified by people & publications that are... 1) Relevant to the thing you're launching 2) Reaching the audience you want to influence 3) Likely to cover launches like yours IMO the smart way to do this is via competitive intel - 2mins on how 👇
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This is great. Also, still get your own damn website and build a landing page with whatever you want to link to.
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bye bye linktree? 👀 Mark Zuckerberg announced in his Instagram channel that you can now have up to FIVE links in your IG bio. And claims that it's “probably one of the most requested features we’ve had”. Read more about it on @verge 👉 theverge.com/2023/4/18/2368
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*High Quality Content* is a myth The adjective “high quality” is so reductive and subjective as to inhibit creators from doing goal-accomplishing work. Worse, it’s used by lazy leaders (or clients) to describe something they think they want in a way that can never be achieved.
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