Understanding LinkedIn Analytics | Hallam Internet
- Updated on: 2017-09-11
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Struggling to make the most of LinkedIn? Find out how you can boost your performance by understanding the valuable data offered by your LinkedIn Company Page Analytics.
LinkedIn is the world’s largest professional network. By the third quarter of 2016, there were 467 million LinkedIn members. A separate study by Hootsuite showed that 57% of companies have a company page on LinkedIn.
If you haven’t already set up your LinkedIn company page, you should do so now. LinkedIn isn’t just for job hunters – it’s also the best platform for professional content distribution. To help make this process more effective, LinkedIn introduced their Content Marketing Score and Trending Content tool in 2014.
Here are some more reasons why your business can’t afford to overlook this social platform:
However, just setting up a LinkedIn company page isn’t always enough.
To really make the most of your page, you should be regularly posting interesting, relevant and engaging updates, which your followers will find useful in some way. This will hopefully result in them liking, sharing or commenting on your posts.
Interaction with your posts will ensure they reach as many people as possible and spread the word about your business. There are plenty of resources online with ideas on the type of content to post.
Google’s company page provides a great example of an engaged following, with the updates they post always receiving plenty of likes, shares and comments:
So, let’s assume you’ve set up your company page and are regularly posting great updates. You will hopefully start to see users liking, sharing and commenting on your posts.
But how do you measure this? How do you ensure that your page isn’t just a popular ‘About Us’ page, and is instead a useful marketing platform?
Thankfully, LinkedIn company pages include an analytics section, which you can find here:
Using the LinkedIn Analytics platform allows you to determine what works and what doesn’t, giving you the information you need to refine your LinkedIn strategy accordingly.
It’s an intuitive and useful interface, but despite this, only 45% of company owners review their analytics. This gives you a great opportunity to get one step ahead.
To get a quick overview of your company page’s performance, click the notifications tab. This gives you a top-level summary of your page’s performance:
To get more granular, click on the analytics tab of your company page to see a range of in-depth metrics about your followers and updates. Here’s an overview of each section to help you understand what all of this data means and what to do with it.
The updates section is first. This shows the most recent posts on your company page:
Along with the title of the post, you can see the date it was published and the audience it was published to. It’s possible to choose to post an update on your company page to a specifically targeted audience.
The next column shows whether you paid for the post to be a sponsored update (learn more here). In the example above, the word ‘sponsor’ is a clickable link. This offers us the opportunity to sponsor our updates directly from this page. Helpfully, in 2016, LinkedIn introduced conversion tracking on sponsored updates, meaning you can measure any conversions from your paid campaigns.
The ‘impressions’ column shows the number of times each update was shown to LinkedIn members. Next is the number of clicks the update received, followed by the ‘interactions’. Interactions can be a like, comment, or share. ‘Followers acquired’ only applies to sponsored updates, and will show how many new people decided to follow your company page as a result of your sponsored update.
In the final column, the engagement rate is calculated by dividing the number of likes, comments and shares by the number of impressions. The ‘engagement’ column can provide you with valuable at-a-glance insight into which updates are working. Or, in other words, which updates are generating interactions with your page.
By looking at metrics such as interactions and engagement, the updates section can be a great way to identify what content performs well and what doesn’t. Over time, you can start to identify similarities in your top-performing content and adjust your approach accordingly.
The ‘reach graph’ is next on your analytics page:
This graph shows you how many people saw your posts on a daily basis. To refine this to only unique users, and cut out people who may have seen your post more than once in the same day, you can click ‘uniques’ at the top of the graph.
You can quickly identify any spikes or dips in popularity, and compare these peaks with updates posted on that day to see what your followers found interesting.
Similarly, the engagement graph visualises the number of clicks likes, comments, shares, followers acquired (for sponsored updates only), and engagement percentage your posts received on a daily basis:
You can move between these metrics easily by clicking on each word above the graph. As with this example, you will probably see a similar pattern across your reach and engagement graphs because as more people engage with your update, more people will see it.
Next, we move on to data about the people who follow your page, giving us insight into who your content is reaching, demographic information and follower growth:
The figure on the left is the total number of people who follow your page. On the right, you can sort this figure in a number of ways. Sorting by seniority lets you see which level of position your followers hold. By hovering over ‘seniority’, you will see a list of other ways your followers can be broken down:
This data allows you to see what kind of people find your page and your updates interesting enough to follow you. For example, sorting by industry shows us that most of our followers are involved in marketing and advertising:
If you want to increase your presence within the automotive industry, for example, you can plan updates containing information which people in that industry would find interesting.
The ‘follower trends graph’ shows how your number of followers has changed over a specific date range:
You can change the date range by clicking on the box on the top right of the graph, with a range of up to a year.
This graph is a useful indication of how well your page is doing generally – if you see a negative trend, you can start investigating why it occurred.
Also, if you have decided to try and boost your follower numbers through a dedicated campaign, you can view the results quickly here. As with all of the graphs in your LinkedIn Analytics, hovering over the blue line will give you exact numbers for each day.
The How You Compare section of your analytics shows the number of followers some of your competitors have on LinkedIn:
This is a good method to set targets for growth:
This is a good basis for competitor analysis, providing you with a glimpse into what your competitors are doing on LinkedIn, compared with your own efforts. You can also click straight through to each company page and have a look at the kind of content they’re posting.
The last section of your LinkedIn company page, the visitors, relates to the people who actually visit your page. A LinkedIn member may have visited your page once, clicked ‘follow’ and never visited again.
Although increasing the number of followers you have is always good, this section provides a useful insight into how many people look at your company page on a daily basis.
The date range can be adjusted in the box on the top right of the graphs. On the left graph, you can see how many times your company page was viewed on a daily basis. On the right, the graph shows how many unique visitors viewed your page, excluding multiple visits from the same user.
As with our example, you will probably see a similar pattern on these graphs to those detailing how many saw and engaged with your updates. It makes sense that if somebody clicks on one of your posts, they might then click on your company page to see what else you’ve posted, or find out more about your company.
Look out for spikes in traffic. Here, we see our page got lots more views on 2 April. We could correlate this with what was posted on that day, and use that information to publish similar content.
Finally, we have the ‘visitor demographics grap’h, which works in the same way as the ‘follower demographics graph’, giving more detailed information on who’s viewing your profile.
Analysing this information allows you to find out about your audience’s background, so you can better tailor your content to them:
In this example, we can see that the majority of people who visited this company page were in the ‘senior’ professional category. If we compare this to our follower demographics, we see that the vast majority of followers of this company are classed as ‘entry’ level.
From this, we can conclude that people holding more senior positions within businesses are visiting our page, but are less likely to click the ‘follow’ button. This is perhaps to be expected, as the companies you choose to follow are listed on your profile. People holding senior, manager or director positions within a company may wish to appear to be more selective about the companies they follow, whereas this may be less of a concern for those holding entry-level roles.
This data can act as a reassuring sign that your target market is looking at your page and your updates, they just might not be following you… yet.
Once you’ve looked at your company page’s analytics and decided on your strategy for your updates, how can you ensure that they have the best possible impact?
Here are five quick tips to improve your company page and your updates, to increase engagement, and to ultimately grow the reach of your business on LinkedIn:
Having a good LinkedIn company page should be just one element of your social media marketing strategy, and it may prove more effective for some businesses than others. Even if you just set up a company page, fill out all of the information, add some branding and use it as a means of driving traffic to your site, it is still worth doing.
To really make the most of your company page, visit the analytics tab regularly, understand the data and refine your LinkedIn strategy to boost engagement. If you do this, more people will see your updates and know about your business, without you having to spend a penny of your marketing budget!
