LinkedIn has never really been at the forefront of analytics data and it still frustrates many of us who use the platform how little data it provides for individual profiles (without paying for LinkedIn Premium). However, if you have a LinkedIn Company Page, you’ll be pleased to hear LinkedIn are gradually adding to the data they provide in these reports. Here’s an overview of the reports available and what they mean for your business.
LinkedIn Analytics is broken down into 3 report dashboards – Visitors, Updates and (a recent addition) Followers.
Visitor Analytics
At the top of the Visitors dashboard, you’ll find visitor highlights; a very brief overview of the visitors to your page including unique visitors, page views and button clicks. It’s handy to see whether traffic and interaction is going up or down, but doesn’t really tell us much.
Beneath this, we have our visitors shown over time, with the ability to filter the data by which page within your Company Profile people viewed (About, Employees, etc). Again, not a huge amount we can take from this, but the graph will please the more visual among us!
Then we start to see some more useful data with the demographics of the visitors who visit your page. This data will give you more insight into the types of people who are looking at your Company Profile and whether they match with your target audience. You can filter data by Job Function, Seniority, Location, Industry and Company Size.
Updates Analytics
As with the Visitor dashboard, you’ll find a highlights section at the top of the Updates dashboard, showing the engagement with your posts.
Beneath the highlights, you’ll see your engagement metrics over time and you can change the data on the chart to show Impressions (default), Unique Impressions, Clicks, Reactions, Comments, Shares or Engagement Rate. This is great to analyse what content is resonating with your audience so you can tweak your messaging and post formats accordingly.
And lastly on this report you’ll see your update engagement broken down into individual posts.
Followers Analytics
A relatively new addition to LinkedIn Analytics, the followers report follows the same format as the previous two with a highlights section at the top showing total number of followers and monthly change.
Then, below you’ll see followers gained over time and can track your progress. This is useful if increasing the size of your audience is one of your goals, but we feel tracking engagement is a better indication of success with any LinkedIn activity.
You’re then shown each individual followers and when they began following your page (useful if you’re nosey like that 😉).
Then, the really interesting stuff! Follower Demographics shows you where your followers are based by default, but can also show you a breakdown of followers by Job Function, Seniority, Industry and Company Size.
This will give you a better picture of who is likely to see your updates and enable you to see whether you’re attracting the followers you really want.
Then, lastly, we have a report showing similar companies and their currently follower numbers and engagement rate so you can benchmark your efforts against the competition!
LinkedIn Analytics is improving in terms of the data it now shows us, providing you have (and regularly update) a Company Page.
Now we just need LinkedIn to tweak its algorithm to show updates from companies so we can get the same reach and engagement we see on personal profiles, but we can’t see that happening any time soon as LinkedIn is all about people connecting with people, not brands.
Whilst LinkedIn Company Pages are worthwhile if you want to showcase what your business does to potential customers or candidates or link your personal profile to show your company logo under your experience section, your main focus should also be your personal LinkedIn profile. This is where real connections are made and relationships created.
Leave a Reply