What Is the Dark Funnel? Explaining New Challenges in B2B Marketing | Blog

What Is the Dark Funnel?

In B2B marketing, the "Dark Funnel" refers to the phase where potential customers are gathering information about products or services, but this activity remains invisible to marketers.
Typically, some form of interaction with demand generation initiatives should occur before a lead is generated. However, if a lead appears suddenly without a clear reason or identifiable prior behavior, it is inferred that the customer's actions took place within the Dark Funnel.

Specifically, this includes the following types of behavior:

Untrackable Browsing

Potential customers may visit a company's website without providing identifiable information such as their company name or contact details.
Additionally, some users access sites using private browsing modes, which prevent the collection of cookies or tracking data.
Furthermore, it can be difficult to identify the source of traffic for users who arrive directly via bookmarks or by manually entering the URL.

Email Forwarding

Marketing-related emails are frequently forwarded to colleagues or decision-makers, meaning the email recipient and the actual website visitor may not be the same person.
Tracking how far an email has been forwarded is extremely difficult, creating a blind spot for access by unidentified users.

Messaging Apps

It is common for individuals to share information via messaging apps, prompting the recipient to begin their own online research on a topic of interest.
Similar to face-to-face word-of-mouth, these actions cannot be fully explained by data from tracking tools alone.

SNS Posts and Advertisements

Users who encounter SNS posts or advertisements on their timelines may leave the platform and visit your website directly.
Standard tracking tools typically categorize these visits as "Direct," making it difficult to distinguish them from other traffic sources compared to users who click directly on post or ad content.
Given the ongoing shift toward remote work since the time of our initial research, it is highly likely that customer behavior triggered by messaging apps and SNS posts has continued to increase.

Dark Funnel

Causes of the Dark Funnel

The dark funnel occurs because customer activities are often difficult to track using traditional analysis methods, such as cookies.
Even though customers express interest through the aforementioned behaviors, analytical tools often fail to track them, leading to a challenge where the context of their actions cannot be fully captured or understood.

Furthermore, the dark funnel can be categorized into two types based on its origin.

Intrinsic Dark Funnel

• Unidentifiable Website Visitors
• Potential Customers Who Have Not Completed a Form
• Different Representatives From Prospective or Existing Client Companies
• Subsequent Leads From the Same Account (Often Treated as "Duplicates")

Extrinsic Dark Funnel

• Traffic From Third-Party Article Syndication
• Traffic Via Product Review Sites
• Industry News Outlets or Personal Blogs That Do Not Share Access Data
• Traffic for Comparative Analysis (Leads From Competitors)

It is essential to uncover the segments that remain invisible to traditional CRM, analytical tools, and data-sharing schemes. By distinguishing between technical causes and workflow-related issues, and implementing appropriate measures for each source, it is possible to gain a better understanding of lead activity within the dark funnel.

The Significance of Understanding the Dark Funnel

Many B2B companies have traffic sources with unidentified origins, such as direct access to specific web pages like blog posts. This type of traffic, where it is impossible to determine if a potential customer has visited the site, accounts for the majority of the Dark Funnel.
"67% of the buying process is completed before sales contact"
This data point is a frequently cited research finding in today's B2B marketing landscape.
If you can segment the information of those who have engaged within this Dark Funnel during the buying process, it becomes possible to discover new targeting criteria for your marketing efforts.
By understanding the existence of the Dark Funnel, marketers can more accurately predict the behavior of potential leads and design efficient demand generation and lead generation strategies based on appropriate cost allocation.

Understanding the Dark Funnel and demand generation are interconnected in that both are strategies to promote customer engagement and lead to final sales.
Understanding the Dark Funnel means tracking and inferring customer behavior across multiple channels and devices, both online and offline, to generate customer insights.
Demand generation is the process of creating relationships with customers through information delivery, such as content distribution and campaign execution, to generate needs that lead to sales.
By leveraging insights from the Dark Funnel and combining them with demand generation, you create a powerful combination that accelerates lead generation.
This allows marketers to identify and target qualified leads, enabling the implementation of measures that lead to improved customer engagement, customer acquisition, and ultimately, increased sales.

By leveraging the untapped potential of the Dark Funnel in B2B marketing, companies can achieve greater results.

Data-Driven Approaches to the Dark Funnel

By understanding activities within the Dark Funnel as described above, marketers can better respond to the needs of potential customers and devise and design strategies to satisfy customer needs that are not easily tracked by traditional methods.
While behavior in the Dark Funnel is difficult to detect with analytics tools and CRM platforms, there are ways to infer what happened in areas that cannot be mapped to the sales funnel through proper data processing and the use of data utilization tools.

Below are representative methods for understanding the behavior of potential customers in the Dark Funnel.

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Filtering "Direct Traffic"

As mentioned above, a large amount of dark traffic is displayed as "Direct" on analytics tools. If such traffic increases, it is necessary to consider the possibility that blog posts or webinar content have attracted attention and interest, and were influenced by information sharing on social media.
By excluding traffic from easily memorable URLs such as the homepage or web pages that may have been bookmarked, you can analyze the remaining traffic, which is almost exclusively Dark Funnel traffic, and grasp how much user behavior was previously untrackable.

Adding a "Share" Button to Content

To verify the hypothesis that the Dark Funnel is generated by sharing on social media, introducing features for sharing your company's content on SNS is one effective way to track customer interaction.
If it is more seamless and easier for users to click a share button to share content with peers than to copy and paste a URL, the likelihood of capturing that behavior increases.

Using Social Listening Tools

Social listening tools are specifically used to track mentions of your company and keywords related to your brand.
For example, suppose a B2B influencer posts about your blog article. If it is found that this resulted in a large amount of direct traffic, it can be inferred that the access was from the influencer's followers.
By setting alerts whenever information is published by influencers on social media, it is possible to logically identify dark traffic.

Conducting Surveys Targeting Leads

Asking leads you have actually acquired is also an effective way to identify the source of the Dark Funnel.
By casually asking during customer information provision, or by adding a question such as "How did you find us?" to inquiry forms, you can identify the source to some extent.
This is also said to be an effective method for estimating the number of leads triggered by word-of-mouth or face-to-face events such as trade shows, in addition to access from social media.

2D Barcodes and Unique Search Keywords

This is a method to minimize cases where the Dark Funnel is generated by face-to-face events or offline advertising.
At face-to-face events or seminars such as trade shows, placing 2D barcodes on your booth, handouts, or presentation slides is an effective identification method.
By providing incentives such as receiving novelties or discounts, the probability of having the 2D barcode scanned will be higher.
For offline advertising, including taxi ads, specifying unique keywords that other companies do not use, in addition to 2D barcodes, is also an effective way to bridge the gap between offline and online.

Utilizing Corporate Information Databases

Corporate information databases collect vast amounts of data and can provide unique insights into lead behavior.
Some platforms are equipped with machine learning algorithms that can predict trends in high-potential customers and future customer behavior.
By using corporate attribute data and intent data, it becomes possible to enrich access generated from the Dark Funnel with information, allowing you to verify whether the access was from companies belonging to your target segment.
It can also provide reference information for discovering new customer segments.

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Conclusion

It is impossible to track every action of leads and potential customers.
As evidenced by the successive announcements regarding the phasing out of third-party cookies, privacy and data security have become increasingly important in recent years.
Companies now need to be more considerate than ever when tracking lead behavior, and from the perspective of technological limitations, the "dark side of customer behavior" as seen by marketers is expected to continue to grow.
In other words, it is impossible to completely eliminate the Dark Funnel in B2B marketing.
However, by utilizing various tools and data, you can make the unknown aspects of customer behavior as inferable as possible and continue the effort to understand your customers.

Our customer data integration solution, "uSonar," is equipped with a data provision function that visualizes the companies to which website visitors belong.
Additionally, we provide intent data that allows you to infer user interests and contact status with competitors, and it is also equipped with an AI function that predicts the order probability of non-trading companies.

For more details, please feel free to contact us via this page.

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