I sat in on a free webinar hosted by Clearscope and by Rand Fishkin: How to Stay Ahead of Marketing’s 5 Big 2024 Trends. A lot of interesting observations and thoughts. I’m not sure I followed it all. I’ll definitely need to review the workshop. Some of things that did catch my attention were, and forgive me if I didn’t quite get it right.
Contents
- Martech Trackability
- What is Dark Traffic
- Less Ad Spend Can Be Good
- Less Competitive Channels
- Zero Click
- Email Marketing
- Summary
- FAQ
Martech Less Trackable
Martech is less trackable, and the recommendation is to test your own models. Everyone is blocking things resulting in less trackability for marketers. This obviously makes it harder to determine where customers are coming from.
What is Dark Traffic
Dark Traffic is a concept I had never heard about until today. If I understood the idea behind this is, someone hears about a product or company through a video, podcast, webinar and then later goes and searches for that product or business online, or maybe the person directly types in the URL. This is now a visitor on your site, but it’s classified in Google Analytics as organic search or direct search channels, neither or which is quite accurate. So, when looking at your organic and direct traffic channels, a lot of real information is being hidden in there and some of it is this “dark traffic”. What I took away from this was, being visible on podcasts, webinars etc. is valuable.
Below is a more formal definition of dark traffic.
Dark traffic refers to website visits where the source or referral path is hidden, missing, or difficult to track using standard analytics tools like Google Analytics. This type of traffic often appears as “direct” traffic, even though it actually originates from sources like:
- Private messaging apps (e.g., WhatsApp, Signal, Messenger)
- Encrypted email clients
- Native mobile apps
- Secure internal tools (Slack, Teams)
- Untracked social posts or ads
- Links copied and pasted directly into browsers
Because the referrer data is stripped or not passed, dark traffic can make it difficult for marketers to accurately measure the effectiveness of their campaigns or understand user behavior.
Why It Matters
Dark traffic skews analytics by underrepresenting top-performing sources. For example, if a user clicks a link shared in a private Slack channel, that visit may show up as “direct” rather than “referral,” making it harder to evaluate what’s really driving engagement.
Less Ad Spend can be Good
Less Ad spend can be good for traffic and business. This seems contradictory but from what I understood from the great pizzeria example, these platforms that people put ads on, they already have a good idea of the journey a customer is going to take to reach you, so at some point in that journey they post up your ad and charge you. The thing is, the probability that the potential customer was going to go to your site anyway, was already high, so why bother with an ad? So the moral, is test this by shutting off your ads for awhile, or part of your ads and seeing what the difference is, if any.
Less Competitive Channels
For this next one, what I understood is that some of the harder to measure channels like social media, etc. are the least competitive, most affordable, and most effective. Invest and make an impact on these channels because your competitors may not be doing so.
Zero Click World
Zero click world. The idea here is platforms want to keep you on their platform. i.e. Linked in wants to keep you on LinkedIn; Facebook wants to keep you on Facebook; YouTube wants to keep you on YouTube, etc. As a result content on these platforms that don’t take users away from the platform are rewarded more. Very few platforms send referral traffic. There was a great graph where the few platforms that do most of the referral traffic are only a small percentage of the channels where most people spend their time online. Social is the largest channel where people spend most of their time online and social doesn’t do much, if any, referral traffic. So, the take away is, figure out what channel your potential customer is using, figure out what that channel does, referral traffic or not, and tailor content to that channel.
Email Marketing: “Last Channel Standing”
The final piece of knowledge I got was that email marketing is the “last channel standing”. What I took away from this was that eventually everyone uses email. Even the younger generation grows up, gets jobs and uses email! Other channels and platforms may die out or plateau over time, email marketing is still going strong and will continue to. There was mention that acquisition of other businesses because they have a good email list may be valuable for some larger businesses. Building your email list is vital when you’re starting out. Good to know!
All in all a very interesting listen this afternoon and I’m quite pleased with my first Clearscope webinar. I also Googled Clearscope after so I could sign up for future webinars!
Summary
Digital marketing is changing fast in 2024. Tracking is getting harder, platforms are keeping more traffic to themselves, and ads aren’t working the way they used to. While this may sound discouraging, it also opens the door for smarter, more human-centered strategies.
Email is back, dark traffic is forcing us to rethink attribution, and zero-click searches mean we need to show up even when people don’t click.
It wasn’t about doing more in 2024, it was about doing better. The marketers who adapt, experiment, and understand their idealcustoer profile will come out ahead.
FAQ
Dark traffic refers to visits where the source is hidden or untrackable—often from messaging apps, emails, or pasted links. It matters because it clouds attribution and may underrepresent successful campaigns.
Not necessarily. But it’s smart to test pulling back spend in some areas to observe organic lift or explore underused channels that may yield better long-term ROI.
Zero-click searches happen when Google answers a user’s question right on the results page (like featured snippets or local packs), meaning users don’t click through. To adapt, marketers need to optimize for visibility within SERPs, like rich results and concise, clear answers.
Yes, more than ever. Email remains a direct, owned channel not controlled by third-party platforms. It’s powerful for nurturing relationships, sharing insights, and creating brand touchpoints beyond the algorithm.
Lean into trend-based metrics, server-side tracking, content engagement data, and customer feedback loops. Attribution will be fuzzier, but patterns and lift still offer insight.
