LinkedIn Analytics and 5 key KPIs to start tracking today

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Written by Hanne Rathcke and Yoana Radoslavova Yordanova

KPIs | Marketing | Social Media

September 25, 2019

LinkedIn is the largest professional network on the internet. It is thus used by many people all over the world and is especially useful for companies operating B2B. There is no lack of data one can collect through this social media channel. The challenge is thus not to get the data, but to sort out which to use and how to use it. This is why you need LinkedIn KPIs!In 2018, HootSuite and Harris Poll did a study on the perception of organizations on social media. They found out that organizations know social media data has direct value. Yet, turning the collected data into something actionable was another story. In fact, 60% of businesses struggle to use social media analytics to improve the company’s revenue.The first part of this article will be an introduction on how to find your analytics on LinkedIn. Later, we will go through some of the most widely used LinkedIn KPIs, their meaning, as well as measurement.

Finding Linkedin Analytics

LinkedIn Analytics is a useful tool. It helps you to follow the metrics of company pages and report on their development.Firstly, only Page Admins can access LinkedIn Analytics. So, to be able to track LinkedIn KPIs, you need to make sure you have admin privileges.

Once you enter the Admin View, you will be able to see your page, posts, and their impressions. But most importantly, you will have access to the pages named Analytics and Activity.

In Analytics you can find three subsections, consisting of data about your visitors, overall updates (engagement) and followers.In each category, there are highlights at the top. They are showing your best score in the given aspect. You can also find a more in-depth view of the data by the different types of metrics. All data is organized in a graph. That gives you the ability to see your profile’s development in time and compare to previous periods.

You can also see user engagement per post, visitors by professional background, and even followers by location and company.In the section Activity, you can find the most recent actions taken on your profile and by whom.

KPIs to track and why are they important

There are many performance indicators one can find on LinkedIn. As shown above, Linkedin has a good system of displaying them into a user-friendly dashboard. However, as always when you set KPIs, you need to ask yourself which are the ones that help your company achieve its desired goals.Moreover, you need to get a grasp of what is it they track exactly and how it can be beneficial to you.We have prepared for you five key metrics that most companies track, what they mean and how can they help you.

Number of followers

As in most other social media platforms, the followers’ count of a page is one of the first metrics to track. It does not only show how well known a company is but provides insight into the influence of a business.

There is another benefit of tracking followers. It can show you what kind of content is attractive for new people and if there are some trends in the growth of a page.

Additionally, you can use the metric to compare your development to different competitors. That will allow you to find out if you stand out or if more marketing efforts are needed.

Page Impressions and Reach

The second couple of key metrics to follow are impressions and reach. Impressions consist of the number of page views you have received. Reach is also known in LinkedIn as Unique Impressions. They differ from impressions because they only measure the number of individual visitors. The more visitors you have, the bigger the possibility of interaction between you and them.

Click Count

You might be spending a lot of money and time on sharing content via LinkedIn. Yet, all is wasted if they scroll past it. Unfortunately, you cannot measure if people are actually reading your post. However, you can measure Click Count. Click Count is the best metric to use when you want to know if your posts are leading to actions from the visitors. It measures how often people click on something you shared.

LinkedIn automatically counts how many people click in the area of your post. This is showed in your analytics and represents everything a visitor might click on – fx. A link, your page or the “read more” button.

When you have set a goal to reach a higher click count, you will need to take some action to make it effective. LinkedIn counts all clicks in the rate. Thus, you can adapt your content strategy accordingly. You can experiment with longer and shorter posts to see if the clicks are related to the “Read More” button. Although you are interested in people reading your full post, you might be more concerned about how many of them do visit your page.

This can be done by writing engaging and intriguing captions for your content. Those captions should call your readers to act. Our recommendation is to keep your text under 150 characters. This way, the data collected can reflect the clicks from visitors and not the “Read More” button.

Engagement rate

LinkedIn engagement is the ability of a product, brand, blog, company or even a person to keep a stable relationship or commitment with their clients. It is defined as the number of times members clicked, liked, commented on, and shared your content in both organic and paid campaigns, as well as the number of followers acquired through them.

If you want people to engage with your posts, you need to create content which encourages them to react. Share on X

This can be done by adapting your content to your target audience and encouraging people to comment or click on it (CTA). In the long run, you can set a tone that shows you listen to your readers and are trying to help them as much as you can. This will build trust and make them more willing to interact with you.

Demographics

You might want to adapt your social media efforts towards a certain set of people – demographic. LinkedIn already has knowledge about its users’ professional life. Thus, they offer you an insight into the identity of your followers.You will be able to take a look at this and see who you are reaching as it is and check if it fits your target. LinkedIn uses the information they have to put the users into categories. These are made anonymous and registered whenever a user interacts with your content.There are many ways in which you can target the desired demographics. One way is to use targeted advertising because doing this you will be able to choose who you want your ads to reach. Hashtags that are relevant can also be beneficial in attracting new people.Another example is to make sure you create content with the right target market in mind. If you are targeting a number of different demographics, a way of reaching them is creating and sharing content that is valuable for all of them.Another idea is to partner up with someone, who will boost your reach. Try to find a person who has the same interests, but who is not a direct competitor.

These are just a few examples of data tracked on LinkedIn, which you can use in your company’s goals. Many of those LinkedIn KPIs are present in other platforms as well and therefore you may be familiar with them. However, using them to track your LinkedIn marketing activities can be essential for a modern company.As always when setting a goal remember to set a deadline. People work more efficiently when up against time. After, you will get a precious opportunity to reevaluate and set new goals based on your experience. In the meantime, use LinkedIn KPIs to find out if you are in the right way to reach those goals.If you have any questions or comments, feel free to reach out to us at contact@cobraid.dk, on social media or in the comment section below.

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