Unless you’re a firm that sells B2B, you possibly haven’t thought much about LinkedIn as a marketer. You might think of LinkedIn as “only being for professionals,” a place where you can find potential employees. Yet LinkedIn is far more than a modern type of employment agency. It’s also a networking platform and a place to find awesome content. Depending on what you sell, you might find that many of your potential customers also spend time on the platform, giving you valuable marketing opportunities.
Nearly 830 million users are on LinkedIn from more than 200 countries, alongside 57 million companies. On average, two new members join LinkedIn per second. 31.98% of LinkedIn’s traffic comes from the USA, 6.65% from the United Kingdom, and 6.42% from India.
On average, each LinkedIn member connects to 400 new people, finds more than 100 new companies looking for their talent or skills, and gains connections to 500+ jobs.
Therefore, it should be no surprise that half (50.3% in 2021) of US marketers choose to include LinkedIn in their marketing strategy.
However, LinkedIn marketers need to set goals and then measure actual results against these goals. And that’s where LinkedIn analytics become so vital. They provide a way for LinkedIn marketers to measure the success of their campaigns and provide evidence for marketers to go to management asking for funds to carry out future LinkedIn marketing campaigns.
The Marketers Guide to LinkedIn Analytics:
- How to Access Your LinkedIn Analytics
- Visitor Analytics and Metrics to Track
- Update (Content) Analytics and Metrics to Track
- Follower Analytics and Metrics to Track
- Competitor Analytics and Metrics to Track
- Lead Analytics
- Talent Brand Analytics and Metrics to Track
- Employee Advocacy Analytics and Metrics to Track
- How Marketers Can Use LinkedIn Analytics to Meet Their Goals
How to Access Your LinkedIn Analytics
You have two main options for accessing your LinkedIn analytics. You can either find them in your LinkedIn app/website (desktop and mobile show different combinations of metrics) or connect LinkedIn to a specialist Social Media marketing platform. While we look mainly at the native LinkedIn analytics in this post, you will find most of the same data in many social media marketing platforms. Therefore, if you post to a range of social networks, rather than just LinkedIn, using a third-party platform, where you can access data on all your social media, could be more beneficial to you than viewing the analytics on each network natively.
If you’re using the LinkedIn app or website to find your analytics, begin by logging into your profile. Then go to the company page you manage. If you have one of LinkedIn’s admin roles, you will see an option to view Analytics at the top of your screen. LinkedIn Page admin roles are Super Admin, Content Admin, Curator, and Analyst. All have access to the Analytics tab, although the Analyst role faces some access limitations.
On the desktop, you can select from:
- Visitors
- Updates
- Followers
- Competitors
- Leads
- Talent Brand
- Employee Advocacy
On mobile, your Analytics screen has sections on:
- Search highlights
- Visitor highlights – click See More for more in-depth details
- Follower highlights – click See More for more in-depth details
- Lead highlights
- Content highlights – click See More for more in-depth details
Visitor Analytics and Metrics to Track
Visitor analytics guide you to the types of people who have looked at your LinkedIn page. These analytics show visitor traffic and demographic trends across different periods. They help you understand who’s visiting your Page and how to convert them into a follower.
- Visitor highlights - the number of page views, unique visitors, and custom button clicks in the last 30 days. This also indicates the percentage change over the previous 30 days (Desktop/iOS)
- Visitor metrics - key metrics based on traffic to your Page. You can filter these by time ranges, page sections, how many times people viewed your Page, and how many unique visitors (non-duplicate) visited your Page. You can view these metrics in aggregate or non-aggregate form (Desktop)
- Visitor demographics - a breakdown of who has visited your Page. You can filter it by time ranges, job function, location, seniority, industry, and company size (Desktop/iOS – called All Demographics on iOS)
- Life Page traffic - the total number of visits and unique visitors to your Life Pages. You can filter it by time ranges, published pages, unpublished pages, or all pages (Desktop)
Update (Content) Analytics and Metrics to Track
LinkedIn company updates are the platform’s version of Facebook posts. For example, you can share breaking news and company milestones, update people on your business activities, or highlight your staff members. And like Facebook, you can share images, videos, and even infographics to accompany your text. LinkedIn also provides an opportunity to publish longer articles as blog posts, where your company can educate or explain its views on an issue.
The analytics you see here depends on whether you are using a desktop or mobile version of LinkedIn. On desktop, LinkedIn calls its analytics about your page updates Update Analytics. However, if you’re checking your analytics on mobile, you will instead find Content Analytics.
If you click on the Analytics tab of your company page, you will find a range of metrics for each post you make, including:
- Post type - the type of content contained within the post (Desktop)
- Audience - who your post is visible to (Desktop)
- Impressions - views when the update is at least 50% on screen or when it is clicked, whichever comes first (Desktop/iOS/Android)
- Article views - each article view counts when a member completely loads the article page. This includes any website or app they’ve clicked the link from. (Desktop)
- Video views - three or more seconds of playback while the video is at least 50% on screen, or a click on the CTA for sponsored videos, whichever comes first (Desktop)
- Clicks - clicks on the update (Desktop)
- CTR - calculated as Clicks/Impressions (Desktop)
- Reactions - total number of reactions on all your updates (Desktop)
- Comments - total number of comments on all your updates (Desktop)
- Shares - total number of shares of all your updates (Desktop)
- Follows - total number of follow-clicks on your sponsored updates. When enabled in ad settings, a follow button is shown on your sponsored updates to LinkedIn members who do not follow your Page (Desktop)
- Engagement rate - calculated as: (Clicks + Likes + Comments + Shares + Follows) / Impressions (Desktop/iOS/Android)
- Content highlights - shows impressions and engagement rate for organic and sponsored content (iOS/Android)
- Content metrics over time - shows aggregated metrics for your organic and sponsored content over the last 30 days – impressions and engagement rate (iOS/Android)
Follower Analytics and Metrics to Track
These give you an insight into the people who have chosen to follow your Page. Ideally, you should tailor your content to meet the needs of your followers – assuming they match your target audience. If they don’t align with your target audience, you probably need to change your content strategy to attract your intended followers.
- Follower highlights - the number of members who have followed your Page since it was created, along with the number of followers your Page has gained and the percentage change over the last 30 days (Desktop/iOS/Android)
- Follower metrics - how your follower numbers have changed over time. They can be filtered by time ranges. You can view these metrics in aggregate or non-aggregate form (Desktop)
- All followers - your current Page followers along with their current place of employment and when they followed your Page. Followers are listed in order of recency (Desktop)
- Follower Demographics - a breakdown of who’s following your Page, with Location, job function, seniority, industry, and company size data (Desktop/iOS/Android – called All Demographics on iOS/Android)
- Companies to track - how your follower gains and losses, number of updates, and engagement rates compare to organizations like yours (Desktop)
Competitor Analytics and Metrics to Track
The Competitor Analytics section (desktop only) gives you (if you’re a page admin) a chance to gauge your brand’s performance on LinkedIn against competitors through follower and organic content metrics. You can find data about:
- Follower metrics - your Page’s all-time followers and new followers gained within a specified time range
- Organic content metrics - organic content metrics for your Page’s updates within a specified time range. If you click in the Total engagement column, you can see a breakdown of Reactions, Comments, and Shares.
Lead Analytics
If you have launched a Lead generation campaign, this section shows the status of your lead gen forms and the number of leads collected from your Page Home and Product pages. In addition, you can download your leads and measure the impact of your campaign by viewing metrics like completion rate, cost per lead, and more.
Talent Brand Analytics and Metrics to Track
Talent brand analytics focus on engagement with your career pages. You can use them to understand how to improve engagement with your career page’s audience. You can adjust the period covered by these statistics by clicking the dropdown next to Talent Brand in the upper left corner of the Page and selecting one of Last 3 months, Last 6 months, or Last 12 months. You can access these analytics on the desktop only.
LinkedIn splits these statistics into four categories:
- Talent pipeline – key metrics based on member actions with your Page and jobs, including total career page impressions, number of page visitors that viewed jobs, number of new hires who visited your pages
- Talent flows – the number of employees gained from or lost to a specific organization’s Page. This helps you identify talent competitors and trends
- Talent attraction – measures how many competitor followers are engaging with your organization by viewing your Page, viewing your open jobs, or applying to your jobs
- Applicant behavior – displays the number of your applicants who have engaged with competitor Pages by viewing their Page, viewing their jobs, or have applied to their jobs
Employee Advocacy Analytics and Metrics to Track
We have written extensively about employee advocacy on the Influencer Marketing Hub and even have a section covering employee advocacy platforms. LinkedIn recognizes the value of employee advocacy and, at one point, even had its own platform – LinkedIn Elevate, although the social network merged it into LinkedIn Pages in 2020.
You can use LinkedIn’s employee advocacy analytics to evaluate content quality and engagement with employee-recommended content. You can access these analytics on the desktop only.
LinkedIn splits employee advocacy analytics into:
- Highlights – number of recommendations made for employees, number of posts generated from recommendations by employees, number of comments by LinkedIn members on these employee posts, number of reshares by LinkedIn members from these employee posts
- Employee Advocacy metrics – change in the number of recommendations, posts from recommendations, reactions to posts, comments on posts, and reshares of posts over a specified timeframe
- Employees posting from recommendations – number of posts shared by employees according to their Seniority, Job function, and Location
- LinkedIn members reached – number of LinkedIn members who interacted with your employees’ posts that were generated from recommendations according to their Companies, Location, Job function, Seniority, and Industry
- Recommendation engagement – based on all recommendations made to employees over a specified timeframe, including recommendation title, author of the recommended content, when the content was shared with employees, number of posts generated by employees from the recommendation, impressions, reactions, comments, reshares.
How Marketers Can Use LinkedIn Analytics to Meet Their Goals
Marketers can look at the engagement data on their posts to gauge the types of updates that work with their audience versus those that don’t gel.
You can help your updates succeed by posting the types of content that will interest the “right” people. For example, B2B businesses don’t publish fluffy, informal social chats on LinkedIn like some businesses might on Facebook. Don’t just attempt to sell on LinkedIn or indeed any social channel. You need to give your audience a reason to want to interact with your content.
One way LinkedIn does this is by offering a publishing platform where you can publish full-length blog posts. Brands can publish articles about their expertise and interests. Even if you run a successful blog, it is worthwhile publishing some original content as a LinkedIn post rather than merely a link to a post on your blog site. Another way you can help increase the popularity of your LinkedIn content is to post at the times when your target audience is most likely to be using the platform. We have previously highlighted the Best Times to Post on LinkedIn to Increase Your Engagement.
If you want visitors to spend more than a few seconds on your Page, you need to ensure that you complete your Page as fully as possible. LinkedIn assists with this by giving you a percentage score for the completeness of your Page. If you haven’t yet attained 100%, it recommends what you can do to improve your score. Some vital things you need for a complete LinkedIn page include your organization’s logo, an overview paragraph, important organization information, and a customized Call-to-Action button. In addition, provide relevant information on as many tabs as possible to increase the time people are likely to spend on your Page.
