With 610 million users (and steadily growing), LinkedIn has become the top platform for B2B marketers to reach an engaged and relevant audience. In fact, 78% of B2B marketers in a Content Marketing Institute study said that it’s the most effective social media platform for content marketing.
LinkedIn is a great platform to establish your authority in the industry by publishing thought leadership articles, connecting with influential figures, and more. However, it’s essential to track your LinkedIn analytics if you want to achieve this goal. Of course, you’ll also need to keep optimising both your LinkedIn profile and your strategy based on these insights.
In addition to the usual metrics you’ll find on other social media platforms, there are several LinkedIn-specific metrics that you should understand to optimise your performance. This post is going to help you do exactly that.
The Ultimate Guide to LinkedIn Analytics for B2B Marketers:
What is LinkedIn Analytics and Where Do I Find It?
LinkedIn Analytics is a compilation of important metrics to help you understand how your company page is performing. You can gain insights about your follower rate, clicks, shares, comments, and more. These metrics can help you understand the performance of your LinkedIn posts, articles, ads, and your company page as a whole.
So it’s crucial to track and understand these metrics to get a clear idea of exactly what’s resonating well with your audience. Are they engaging more with a particular type of content? Is there any content format that seems to engage them better? What kind of topics and angles do they seem to appreciate?
You’ll be able to get answers to all of these questions by tracking your LinkedIn analytics.
The most advanced LinkedIn analytics data is only available to company pages, so you’ll have to make sure that your company page is set up before you can view it. It is also accessible only to page admins. On your company page, you’ll be able to see the “Analytics” drop down among the menu options on the top left hand side of the screen.
Which Metrics Can I Track?
You can find three main categories of metrics under LinkedIn analytics – visitors, updates, and followers. Each section has sub-metrics to give you insights on a different aspect of your performance.
Visitors
This section provides you with insights about people who have visited your company page. This will help you gain valuable insights about what kind of visitors you’re attracting. You can use these visitor demographics to create accurate buyer personas and develop content that would appeal to your visitors.
You’ll be able to track metrics like:
- Page Views – This shows you the total number of people viewing your company page, and takes into account views of your career page as well.
- Unique Visitors – This metric measures the number of unique visits and excludes data about multiple visits from the same user.
- Visitor Metrics – This shows you how your page views change over time in the form of a line chart.
- Visitor Demographics – This metric helps you understand the demographics of your visitors including their job function, location, industry, company size, and seniority.
Updates
This section provides you with metrics so you can understand how your posts are engaging your audience.
You can find metrics like:
- Reactions – This helps you understand the total number of reactions you’re getting for all your posts. You can also get a breakdown of the individual reactions garnered by each post.
- Comments – This shows you the total number of comments you’re getting for all your posts. You also get a breakdown of the total comments garnered by individual posts.
- Shares – This shows you the total number of shares for all your posts. You also get a breakdown how many shares each post is getting.
- Update Title – This shows you the title of each update, so it’s easier to track how each post is performing.
- Posted by – You can also view which team member posted the update so you can keep track of their activities.
- Created – This helps you keep track of when your posts were published.
- Impressions – This metric shows you how many times a certain update was displayed to a user.
- Video Views – You can use this metric to understand how many people viewed 3 seconds or more of your video or clicked on your CTA.
- Clicks – This metric shows you how many times people clicked on your update or company branding.
- CTR – CTR measures the total number of clicks divided by the total number of impressions for each post.
- Follows – This shows you the total number of “follows” on each sponsored post.
- Engagement Rate – This helps you understand the total number of reactions, shares and follows divided by total impressions for each post.
- Update Metrics – You can also view a line graph of how some of your metrics change over time for both organic and sponsored updates. You’ll be able to view changes in impressions, unique impressions, clicks, reactions, comments, shares, and engagement rate.
Followers
This section provides you insights about people who are following your company page.
You can view metrics like:
- Total Followers – This shows you the total number of people who are following your company page.
- New Followers – This shows you how many new followers you’ve gained in the last 30 days.
- Follower Metrics – This is a line graph displaying the changes in follower rate over time. It also shows you sponsored data so you can understand the number of followers you’ve gained through ads and sponsored content.
- Follower Demographics – Like with visitor demographics, this metric helps you understand who your followers are. You can view follower demographics such as location, job function, seniority, industry, and company size.
Companies to Track – You can even track your competitors through this section. It will automatically be updated with insights about how similar companies are performing. You can track their total followers, new followers, number of updates, and engagement rate.
How to Make the Most of LinkedIn Metrics
While you may be able to access tons of performance metrics through LinkedIn analytics, none of them will matter unless you know how to use those metrics. Otherwise, you’ll have a bunch of data on your hands with no way of putting it into practical use.
So take a look at some of these ideas that will help you understand how to make the most of these LinkedIn analytics metrics:
#1: Optimise Your Content Strategy
The LinkedIn analytics data on your page updates is extremely useful for fuelling and optimising your content strategy. You can also use the visitor and follower demographics to get a better idea of what your audience might like
Use your visitor and follower demographics to understand what topics and angles would be relevant to your audience. For example, if a majority of your visitors are from small businesses, you might want to start creating content that’s directed towards them.
You can then use the update metrics like engagement, impressions, shares, clicks, etc. to see how your posts are performing. Test out different content angles, topics, approaches, and formats to see what your audience seems to engage with the most.
All of these insights should be able to help you in building a robust content marketing strategy that delivers results. Should you be creating more LinkedIn video content or should you be publishing more articles? Does your audience favour visual content over text content? Do they like how-to articles and tutorials more than they like stories?
#2: Optimise Your Ad Campaigns
LinkedIn analytics also provides you with valuable insights on how your sponsored updates are performing. You can test different ad creative and placements to see what appeals to your target audience and drives the best return on investment.
Which ads are getting you more impressions? Are they driving higher engagement rates than your other ads?
You can also view your follower growth rate through sponsored ads and updates. This helps you get a more comprehensive look at how your paid campaigns are performing. So you’ll be able to use all of this data to optimise your ad campaigns and create ads that yield higher ROI.
#3: Analyse the Performance of New Strategies
If you’ve recently updated your marketing strategy, LinkedIn analytics is a great way to keep an eye on how this strategy is working out for you. Perhaps you’re targeting a different set of audiences through your paid campaigns.
Are you getting more engagements and clicks? Or perhaps you’ve adopted a new content publishing calendar. Are you reaching and engaging people better?
Even if a new strategy isn’t working as desired, you’ll be able to make changes immediately to prevent further damage. So LinkedIn analytics provides you with a lot of value if you’re striving to get results by regularly optimising your strategies.
#4: Keep an Eye on the Competition
As mentioned earlier, the “Followers” section helps you see which companies to track. You can compare your performance metrics against that of the competition.
Are they getting more new followers than you? How many updates do they have and are they getting more engagements than you?
You can use these insights to keep track of where you stand against them. In case of massive differences in performance or sudden improvements in their performance, you could check out their posts to learn what’s working for them.
Final Thoughts
You now have a clear idea of what LinkedIn analytics is all about, where you can access it, and what kind of insights you can get from it. You even know how to make the most of these insights to get better results from your LinkedIn marketing strategy. Use these tips to create a robust LinkedIn marketing strategy and become a successful B2B marketer.
