What is Shadow Traffic? Shadow Traffic

Shadow traffic is visits to your site that are not captured by your typical analytics software provider.

Shadow traffic is real traffic from real people, but you won’t have any visibility into them or their behavior. Shadow traffic—real traffic that your analytics misses.

What Is the Cause for Shadow Traffic?
The 2 main causes for Shadow Traffic are a result of tools such as ad blocking software, users’ browser privacy settings, that are preventing from analytics tools from identify and record these visitors, both on web browsers and mobile browsers.

How Much Shadow Traffic Does My Website Get?
Indicators estimation show that the average Shadow Traffic is 30% and looking at the future, the Shadow Traffic all over the internet will increase. Why? as privacy issues are getting more to the front of the discussion, we will see Shadow Traffic increasing over time as more users are going to apply advanced privacy settings that is the main Shadow Traffic cause.

Is Shadow Traffic Real Visitors?
Yes, Shadow Traffic is website’s real visitors, by real people (not generated by machines) that you will never see them or their behavior on any of your analytics tools.

When your website gets a real visitor, the analytics software is getting an indicator sent automatically to record the visit. These indicators are called ‘events’ which give the information on the visitor sessions which are indicated as real traffic. As ad blockers and privacy settings are put in place, these ‘events’ cannot be sent to the analytics software which then does not record the visitor & his behavior being on your website which are called Shadow Traffic (Shadow Visitors).