While “dark social”, the default/misattributions of unknown traffic as “Direct” or a similar term, isn’t very new (coined in 2012, which is ancient by web standards), tackling the issue of finding the true referral of as much traffic as possible in a systematic way is a fairly recent endeavor. Keeping analytics campaign information standardized in a large organization can be difficult, to say the least. Google has helped by providing a handy do-it-yourself link-builder but LunaMetrics has gone one step further can created a customizable Google Sheets document (with an explainer) that has more information that can easily be shared across an organization so that everybody knows, for instance, the landing page URL (and vanity URL) for every part of a campaign.
I’ve already added the document to my collection of tools to simplify and keep track of my work.
