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For example, SparkToro’s own analytics show that 76% of its visitors come from direct traffic and 13% from organic searches, accounting for 90% of its total traffic. However, this data is misleading because it does not reflect the actual sources that lead users to search or directly enter a company's URL. In fact, most of the traffic is likely to come from various platforms such as WhatsApp, Slack, LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, and Discord, where people discuss and share links to company content.

An experiment conducted with Steve Lamar from Very Good Data argentina number dataset showed that many traffic sources were incorrectly labeled as direct. For example, traffic from Slack communities (whether private or public) is often misattributed because the recommendation string is removed. This problem is particularly prevalent in B2B environments, where discussions and link sharing in private channels can result in website visits that cannot be accurately traced to their origin. As a result, companies are unable to view and measure the impact of these important traffic sources.

Chart showing dark traffic on major social networks (SparkToro) "We get traffic from WhatsApp, Slack, messages and boards, LinkedIn, Instagram and Facebook and all these places where people are talking about us and linking to our posts. And the referral data is hidden." - social media investment because you can no longer see referral traffic, you're likely to lose out to smarter teams focused on impact and attribution.