Although the name sounds alarming, “dark social” is not inherently sinister. It is clandestine only in the sense that dark social details are hidden from the analytics tools marketers and SEOs use for tracking website traffic, including lead generation and conversions. The mystery is frustrating, but it’s not hopeless. There are ways law firms can recapture or infer important details from dark social, even in the absence of familiar tracking metrics.
Highlights
- “Dark Social” is a term digital marketers use for website traffic and leads that come from private messaging apps and link-sharing platforms, which strips identifying data from the referral source. Without identifiers, the source remains hidden.
- Tracking codes aren’t the only way to get information about referral sources. Make sure the humans handling your intake interviews ask the question “where did you hear about us” in as much detail as possible. Just don’t make that the first question you ask.
- Law firms are in a good position to leverage “indirect data” to draw useful conclusions about how dark social activity contributes to lead conversions and bookings.
Is Dark Social a Bad Thing?
All of this so-called “dark social” can be frustrating territory for law firm communications strategists and SEOs. These professionals rely heavily on granular detail in the traffic reporting for their clients’ websites to determine what is working well, with which “segments” of the client’s audience, and, of course, which pages are underperforming and may need serious help. Working with more limited detail can often mean having to draw more inferences than marketers would like when developing content strategy recommendations. The same limitations also pose difficulties for academic researchers studying how information circulates online.
From Dark to Light: Who’s Sending Traffic to Your Site?
Think about how many times you share links in private messaging apps or workplace tools like Teams, Slack or Zoom. In most cases, all “referring data” is removed from the link once someone clicks it. (Google Analytics puts dark social activity in the “direct traffic” category, along with other traffic it can’t identify.) While this makes it difficult to track exactly which specific sources are sending you traffic, a number of workarounds that can yield insights, even into dark social channels.
Even better: Law firms are particularly well-positioned to take advantage of indirect data to draw useful conclusions about who is visiting and sharing pages from their websites, and how that dark social activity contributes to growth in lead conversions and consultation bookings.
What To Watch For: Newsletters and Traffic Timing
Many law firms send out weekly or bimonthly email newsletters. Often these newsletters include links not only to new blog or podcast content, but to older materials that are relevant. If your pages see a boost in traffic over the 48-72 hours after they have been linked in a newsletter, the timing suggests that the newsletter may have contributed to the increase in traffic.
To help verify this point, depending on the service you use for your email campaigns, you may be able to get data on the number of link clicks from inside opened emails. Comparing those numbers to the “direct” traffic represented in your site’s traffic reporting can give you a basis for comparison. This will help you develop a more accurate estimate of the percentage of traffic that really is coming from links embedded in your law firm newsletter. Keep in mind that the traffic reported as “direct” in Google Analytics will include other sources as well; an increase, rather than an absolute number, will be the most useful information for refining your marketing strategy.
What To Watch For: Dark Social on Social Media
Some social media platforms let you see when someone has “shared” your content using an in-app messaging system (distinct from sharing to their own page or profile), even if you cannot see the identity of the sender or recipient. Threads uses this model. Other platforms exclude this type of data from reporting, or simply never capture it. Private shares made off-platform (for instance, via the SMS or RCS messages you are likely used to sending and receiving) are generally invisible to the platforms themselves. However, they may sometimes register a “view” or “impression” after someone clicks the link to a post shared via an off-platform messaging app.
There is still some utility to analyzing the contents of posts that perform well on “send” or “shared” measures, as long as you keep in mind platform-specific limitations. The reasoning here is similar to that for watching traffic on links you have recently embedded in an email newsletter. But in this instance, because in-app messaging systems deliver posts directly to the recipient’s inbox, it is the type of content and the topic of the shared post that is significant, rather than the content of a page that is hosted on your law firm’s website.
There are still some techniques for capturing at least some of the data you miss from activity on your social platforms. A typical example is of a person who sees your social media post, copies the link directly to the individual post, and then sends that link to a friend using an off-platform messaging system, like chat. Social media platforms are, in general, even less equipped to track this type of dark social activity than website analytics services.
Often, however, you can recapture much of this lost information for posts that do convert.
For many firms, the intake question “how did you hear about us?” is the single most actionable lever available. To make the data usable, train intake staff to ask the question consistently on every call, record responses in a structured field rather than free text (so the data can actually be aggregated), and review the results monthly alongside your analytics reports. Keep an eye on the ratio of calls that mention your law firm’s social media to those that do not, and watch whether this ratio increases with increasing impressions and views on your social platforms to track how efficiently social media, including as shared via “dark social” activity, is serving your outreach goals.
Increasing the Accuracy of Your Inferences: Applying UTM Parameters
You cannot control the links to individual social media posts hosted on-platform; the platforms control those URLs. However, when you include a link to your website content in your social media posts, you may be able to trace those visits (they will often show the social media platform as the referral source). You also have the option to set up UTM parameters that let you to identify the source of inbound traffic with greater granularity.
What Are UTM Parameters?
UTM stands for “urchin tracking module,” and refers to a string of tags appended to the “tail” of a URL. These textual tags serve to mark specific information about inbound website traffic. By using unique identifiers for each marketing campaign and tracking the data collected via tags, digital marketing professionals can gather data about site visits. There are a number of possible UTM parameters, but these five tend to be among the most commonly used:
- Term (utm_term)
- Content (utm_content)
- Campaign (utm_campaign)
- Source (utm_source)
- Medium (utm_medium)
A tagged URL might look like this:
yourfirm.com/estate-planning-blog?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=spring2026
Google’s free Campaign URL Builder generates these tags without requiring you to type them manually. Also, most email marketing platforms now include UTM tagging as a built-in feature. Once tagged links begin reaching your site, the parameters will appear in your Google Analytics reporting. Of the five parameters listed, utm_source and utm_medium are generally the most useful in capturing dark social data.
How Can You Use UTM Parameters?
Effective use of UTM parameters starts with assigning a unique identifier to each “campaign.” For digital marketing purposes, a “campaign” can be a single email newsletter. A campaign can also be a series of related posts across all the digital surfaces where your law firm appears. In fact, a key unifying element of many campaigns is the distinct URL linked in each of the associated posts, emails, and so on. Confer with your digital marketing team to determine which specific tags you want to use for tracking.
The utm_source, which identifies the referring site, app or platform, and utm_medium, which distinguishes the “medium” through which the content is presented (an email, a social post), may play a leading role in helping your law firm to recognize dark social traffic. From there, your marketing team will be able to suggest additional metrics that could help to fine-tune your law firm marketing strategy.
Specific Concerns About Dark Social for Lawyers
Of course, before deploying any new tracking practice, it is worth pausing to consider how it interacts with your professional responsibility obligations. American Bar Association (ABA) Model Rule 7.1 and most state ethics rules impose strict limitations on communications about legal services. Make sure to design your firm’s intake-stage data collection so that it does not capture information from prospective clients in a way that creates the appearance of improper solicitation. Tracking practices should also be reflected in your firm’s website privacy policy.
When in doubt, confer with ethics counsel before rolling out a new tracking workflow.
Think of Dark Social Activity as ‘Negative Space’
Dark social will never be fully visible, but the gap between “invisible” and “informed” is smaller than it looks. You may need to use a combination of techniques to develop a detailed picture, but the unifying strategy is one of charting “negative space” — tracing the outlines of the data you do have to draw the shape of what you cannot see. Digital marketers who are used to handling law firm accounts are often adept at this type of tracking practice because it aligns so readily with law firm priorities, so keep this in mind as you consider the next step in your marketing journey.
Dark Social For Lawyers FAQ
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