Bitly's Dark Traffic

Saw this on my Bitly dashboard:

Bitly Tracks Dark Traffic

Looks like my top traffic channel is from the dark social web; or basically links that web analytics tools are unable to track. This is curious because I use Bitly almost exclusively as a link shortener on social media sites. At least Google Analytics knows what traffic comes from mobile, device type, or network source. Personally, it just reads like a bad programming error or laziness on the platform's part.

Bitly's blog suggests that 70% of all online referrals (source) come from dark social.

You'd think that if you shortened a link from a news source's native domain, that it would be easier to track. Or, even if you copied someone else's shared link and stripped out their tracking code, that Bitly would be able to track the comings and goings from your Twitter account to a hosted domain.

Alas, whatever Bitly is failing to track it is annoying. This is what I'd call junk analytics.