Fighting Dark Social: LinkedIn Comes into the Light
(Editor’s note: Beginning several days ago (the evening of Tuesday, 1/20, to be precise), you may have noticed a significant increase in the traffic on your site from LinkedIn: across our network, traffic from linkedin.com increased by over 3x. Below, we’ll detail why that change occurred, and what publishers should expect going forward.)
Over the past year, publishers have become increasingly interested in traffic from LinkedIn, as the LinkedIn team has been steadily working to improve their feed experience with the launch of their new mobile app and content platforms. Nevertheless, when looking at referrer traffic in analytics tools like Chartbeat, web traffic from linkedin.com has always seemed smaller than it should for such a large platform, especially given the volume of traffic we see from LinkedIn’s counterpart apps, which shows up under the referrer name lnkd.in.
On January 20th, that changed when LinkedIn made a change to correctly attribute their traffic, some of which had previously been categorized as dark social. The impact of that change was immediate and significant.
Let’s look at traffic coming from linkedin.com to sites across the Chartbeat network over the last six months, we see two trends: a steady increase over the year, followed by a huge increase at the end of January.
Zooming in on the right side of the graph, January, 2016, we can see the immediate change in traffic as the attribution change was pushed:
If we compare numbers from just after the change to the same time during previous weeks, traffic from linkedin.com was up by over 3x.
Some sites saw more than 6x increases in their LinkedIn traffic.
While LinkedIn still isn’t a major traffic source for many types of sites, we expect that many business-, media-, and technology-focused sites will see LinkedIn as a top-10 referrer going forward.
With Facebook’s change last year to help attribute all of their traffic, LinkedIn’s change here, and other work to come, we’re excited to see more traffic correctly attributed. We’ll continue to work with platforms in the coming months to bring their dark social traffic into the light.