General Marketing
Dark Funnel
The dark funnel refers to the buyer journey touchpoints that are invisible to traditional marketing analytics, such as word-of-mouth, private messages, community discussions, and dark social sharing. It represents the growing portion of influence that cannot be attributed through standard tracking.
Examples
A B2B buyer tells their sales rep they found the company through a Slack community recommendation, a touchpoint that no marketing analytics tool would have captured.
Best Practices
Add "How did you hear about us?" fields to forms, invest in brand marketing to seed the dark funnel, and accept that not all influence can be tracked by attribution tools.