Businesses are increasing their investments in digital marketing because it works. But not all the time. Many of these companies continue to make the same digital marketing errors that affect their traffic and their level of generation of leads and the return on investment.
It has become necessary for businesses and nonprofits to compete in the digital space in order to thrive and survive. For corporations and large businesses, having a strong digital marketing presence is no longer a luxury. As we’ve seen over the past year, when everything shuts down and goes digital, having a digital marketing presence is crucial to survival. However, digital marketing is not without its challenges; some are easier to overcome than others.
The following are the largest digital marketing issues and ways to overcome them.
1. The Rise of Dark Traffic
The rise of dark traffic is also known as ‘dark social’. A dark traffic refers to a website traffic from an unknown or impossible source. This makes it difficult for a marketing person to decide where the visitors come from and how to interact with the content. In fact, most of this traffic probably comes from various platforms, such as Whatsapp, Slack, LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook, Tiktok and Discord, where people discuss and share links.
In a recent experiment with Steve Lamar of Really Good Data, a major problem in traffic attribution was discovered; many traffic sources, especially those from Slack communities, are incorrectly labeled as direct traffic. This misattribution occurs because referral strings from these sources are often stripped, losing valuable information about the source of the web traffic. This issue is particularly pronounced in a B2B context, where private and public discussions in Slack channels often generate a large number of website visits that cannot be properly tracked. Therefore, companies cannot measure with the impact of these important traffic sources.
Causes of Dark Traffic
- Privacy Tools and Ad Blockers: Ad blockers and privacy focused browsers can block referral data from being sent to websites, obscuring the true source of traffic.
- Social Media and Messaging Apps: When users share links through private messages or closed social media groups, referral information is often removed, making the traffic appear direct.
- HTTPS to HTTP referrals: When a secure (HTTPS) website links to a nonsecure (HTTP) site, referrer data may be lost due to browser security protocols.
- Link Redirection: Redirects or tracking links can sometimes strip out referrer information which can lead to untraceable traffic.
- Email Campaigns: If tracking parameters are not included or if the email client strips referrer data, then links shared via email can sometimes be tracked as direct traffic.
Impact of Dark traffic
- Attribution Issues: It becomes difficult to accurately attribute traffic to specific marketing channels, which can lead to misallocation of marketing resources and inaccurate ROI metrics.
- Inaccurate Data: Misleading analytics data can impact your understanding of which channels are working well and the effectiveness of different marketing strategies.
- Strategy and Budget Allocation: Without clear attribution, it’s difficult to justify marketing spend and make data driven decisions about resource allocation.
- Understanding User Behavior: Limited visibility into traffic sources can hinder efforts to understand user behavior and effectively tailor content and campaigns.
Solutions to mitigate the impact
- Embrace Privacy First Technologies: Use marketing technologies that comply with regulations like GDPR and CCPA prioritize user privacy.
- Leverage First Party Data: Focus on collecting data directly from interactions with customers through your own channels, such as websites, apps, and email campaigns.
- Implement Cross Channel Tracking and Integration: Use such platforms that unifies data across multiple marketing channels and touchpoints.
- Focus on Customer Engagement and Personalization: Deliver personalized content, offers, and experiences using available data.
2. The death of trackable martech
- The notion of “the end of trackable marketing technology” reflects a growing concern and challenge in the marketing technology (MRT) space that marketing performance is becoming increasingly difficult to track and measure. This situation is driven by a combination of evolving privacy regulations, a changing digital landscape, and shifting user behavior. The “Death of Martech Trackables” refers to the decline in the effectiveness and accuracy of marketing technology tools in tracking and measuring marketing activities. This decline is due to several factors:
- Stricter confidentiality rules.
- Increased use of privacy tool.
- Complexity of multi channel marketing.
- Data accuracy and comprehensibility.
- Customer trust and transparency.
Key takeaways
- AdTech is less monitored and less reliable than in years past. Make sure you build and test your own models.
- Scams, misleading allocation, and simply displaying simple expenses means that it is essential to perform regular advertising audits and manually complain to advertising suppliers.
- If you are currently broadcasting advertisements based on third party cookies (in other words, almost all other than Apple ecosystem), you will probably be preparing for a largescale remodeling next year, probably, including higher prices.
3. The big lie of marketing attribution
Key Takeaways
4. The end of the rising tide
In the past quarter century, all the graphs linked to the use of the web, the use of search engines, and Internet users are trending upwards continuously. Even during the deceleration in the 2009 financial crisis, we have always seen more people online and engaged in ecommerce activities as compared to the past. This continuing growth trend is a constant in the digital environment.
However, now we are observing a decline in traffic available from major sources like google and facebook. The growth rate is declining. The major platforms like Meta and Google are experiencing only modest growth of 5% and 3% respectively.
Hard-to-measure channels, investments like content marketing, social media, press and PR, media relations, small scale influencer marketing, podcasts, webinars, conferences and events all these things are hard to measure.
Channels like Facebook, Google, Apple, and Amazon offer sophisticated tools for tracking and attribution, which are widely used because they provide clear metrics and insights. However, these channels also tend to be highly competitive, making it challenging to stand out.
Key takeaways
- Talk to senior management about balancing growth and profitability.
- Channels that are difficult to measure often offer significant advantages in terms of expense and impact.
- If you’re copying your competitors or investing in channels based on a standard model, there’s almost certainly room for improvement.
5. Living in a zero click world
“Zero click” refers to a scenario in which users can find the information they need without going to a website. This phenomenon is fueled by advances in search engine technology, particularly Google’s focus on providing direct answers, as well as the rise of various other digital platforms and tools that deliver information directly on the search results page or within apps. Major platforms like Facebook, linkeldn, Google, Twitter etc keep users directly on their own sites rather than sending traffic to external websites. These platforms prioritize their own content. This shift has profound implications for digital marketing strategies, traffic attribution, and the overall scenario of online engagement.
The trend of large platforms trapping users within their ecosystems brings both challenges and opportunities to businesses: it makes traffic attribution more difficult and increases competition, but it also offers new ways to engage with audiences through platform features and native advertising. Compatible strategies for using specific opportunities on the platform, diversifying marketing activities and using advanced analysis, companies can navigate this development environment and continue to achieve marketing goals.
Key takeaways
- Those who focus only on the acquisition of traffic are trapped in research.
- To succeed in the modern social media times, embracing zero click content is increasingly essential.
- To effectively determine platform prioritization for your marketing efforts, it’s essential to conduct research into where your audience engages most actively.
- Proving acquisition via referral strings can be challenging and may sometimes lead to misleading conclusions about your marketing efforts.
