LinkedIn can be an incredibly powerful platform for putting your business in front of other businesses. However, it takes time, testing and measuring to get it right and see results – and LinkedIn analytics can help to show you when it’s working, and when it’s not.
LinkedIn analytics – a series of different tools and statistics – measures the performance of your business’ profile and its content. That performance includes things like reach, engagement and conversions, and you can also directly compare these against your competitors.
In this blog, we walk you through LinkedIn analytics, explaining how each tool works – and how it can be measured and used to improve future performance and results.
NB: to analyse a company’s LinkedIn performance in detail, you need to be assigned a page admin role. All page admin roles – super admin, content admin, curator and analyst – are able to view and export the page’s analytics reports.
The structure of LinkedIn analytics…
LinkedIn analytics is split into five sections:
- Visitors
- Followers
- Leads
- Content
- Competitors.
Each of these gives you an insight into different areas of your profile’s performance. You can export reports to Excel and save to your desktop using the ‘export’ button at the top of each of the sections.
1. Visitors
In a nutshell, the ‘visitors’ section gives you insight into the kinds of people who are clicking on (or visiting) your LinkedIn company page.
You can change the date range at the top of the page to filter to a specific time period. If you’re just after an overview, this will default to show the past month’s analytics.
Here, you can view:
- Page views – how many views has your company page had?
- Unique page views – how many different accounts have viewed your page?
- Custom button clicks – how many times have visitors clicked your page’s main call to action (eg ‘visit website’)?
You can also filter the above for specific pages. For example, if you’ve set up a new page on your profile – such as ‘jobs’ – you can see the impressions this specific page has had. This is particularly useful if you’re focusing on recruitment through your company page, for example.
In the visitors tab, you can also get more information about the kinds of people looking at your page, including:
- Job function
- Company size
- Industry
- Location
- Seniority
This insight can help you to understand if your profile’s reaching the right people, or whether you need to change your approach and messaging to attract different audiences.
2. Followers
The ‘followers’ section of LinkedIn analytics gives you greater visibility into the profiles following your company account. If you’re looking for a list of specific people following your LinkedIn company page, you can find this by scrolling to the bottom of the page – it will also show you the month they followed your page in.
Firstly, the follower section gives an insight into the total number of followers your page has, and how this has changed over time (ie how many followers have you gained in a specific time period?)
Much like the visitors tab, this also gives you insight into the job function, company size, industry, location and seniority of your page followers.
(Quick tip: you can boost your page followers by using the ‘invite connections’ tab here – sending direct notifications to people to follow your page).
3. Leads
To access lead analytics, you need to add a lead generation form to your page. This may be more relevant to some businesses than others, so do take the time to consider if you want to capture leads directly on your LinkedIn company page.
To capture leads, you need to choose a call to action from the below:
- Contact sales
- Request a free demo
- Start free trial
- Get started.
Once you’ve got this set up, much like the other sections, you can see an overview of who’s submitting your lead generation form – both in terms of quantity (raw numbers) and quality (demographic information).
4. Content
Content is arguably the most valuable section of LinkedIn analytics, as it gives you an insight into the performance of the content you’re posting. This includes:
- Impressions (number of views of your content)
- Unique impressions (number of different views of your content)
- Clicks (where people have clicked to engage with your content – eg enlarging an image or playing a video)
- Reactions
- Comments
- Shares (or reposts)
- Engagement rate (the percentage of people engaged with your content when they see it. An average engagement rate usually sits between 3-5% as we’re in a ‘scrolling’ generation).
Below this overview section, you can also see performance of individual posts, including their click through rates and individual engagement rates. This will give you an idea of the kind of content your audience enjoys – and what they’re not so fussed about – enabling you to focus your time and efforts into the content that engages them.
5. Competitors
To enable competitor analytics, you need to select your top competitors – those who you’d like to compare your performance against. You can choose up to nine, and they have to have a LinkedIn company page for it to work.
Once you’ve picked your competitors, you can look at and directly compare numbers for:
- Total followers
- New followers
- Total engagements
- Total posts.
You can use these statistics to work out a number of valuable stats to compare your performance with your competitors’, including:
- Follower growth (as a percentage of total followers)
- Engagement rate (as a percentage of total followers)
- Average engagement per post.
This section can also give you an idea of how frequently you should be posting to stand out from your competition.
Using LinkedIn analytics to drive results
When used properly, LinkedIn analytics gives a whole host of extremely valuable insights that can drive stronger performance on the platform.
By regularly checking in on your results – for example, once per month or quarter – and generating reports from this, you can build a picture of how your profile and content is performing over time. You can then use this picture to make strategic decisions regards the direction of future content to improve followings, impressions and engagement.
Unsure how to get LinkedIn working for your business?
Book your free communications review with Kinetic today – we’ll explore what’s working well and give you some ideas for improvement:
Alternatively, fill out the form below and one of the team will reach out to you directly:
