I created a landing page and then attached it to a LinkedIn article, and also a LinkedIn post.
The page was unique so the only hits on it ‘should’ have only come from LinkedIn, one way or another.
However the analysis for the page shows a different number of direct hits (more) and social media.
Has anyone come across this and would they have an explanation as to why both show up, my intuition would have been that if LinkedIn counts as social media then they should all have been in that category.
Thanks for reaching out.
I want to tag in some subject matter experts to see if they have any suggestions.
Hi @erzaga20@Bryantworks@Dan1, do you have any thoughts on this?
Thanks!
Jess
Yes theoretically everything should be coming from the social sources with a few exclusions like your own internal testing (if you haven’t stopped your IPs from tracking).
But I think what’s most likely happened here is “dark social”. In short, this is social traffic that most analytics programs can’t capture since it lacks referral data, meaning that it doesn’t have UTM parameters when clicked and is thus bucketed with direct.