LinkedIn Analytics: Your Complete 2024 Guide

Team Locowise posted on 23 April 2024

There are a ton of social media platforms available for reaching end users and customers, and many of them are hugely effective for consumer brands. But when it comes to B2B social media marketing, no platform has quite cracked the nut like LinkedIn.

Not only is LinkedIn the best social channel for B2B marketing, it also has one of the best out-of-the-box analytics sections around. But with all that information available, how do you focus on the metrics that truly matter? Here’s your full guide to LinkedIn analytics, including how to access your data, interpret it, export it and leverage the insights you gain from it.

What is LinkedIn Analytics?

LinkedIn Analytics provides detailed insights into the performance of your personal profile or company page on LinkedIn. It equips users with data on who is viewing their content, how they interact with posts, and the growth of their professional network. This tool divides into various sections, each offering a specific type of data, helping users tailor their LinkedIn strategy effectively.

Why is it important to track LinkedIn analytics?

Understanding the metrics that LinkedIn Analytics provides can significantly impact your professional footprint by:

Enhancing Engagement:

By knowing what content performs best, you can produce more of what your audience prefers, increasing interactions and engagement

Grow Your Network Efficiently:

Understanding who is viewing and interacting with your content can help you target the right demographics and expand your professional network strategically.

Measure ROI on Paid Campaigns:

For businesses investing in LinkedIn Ads, analytics provide essential feedback on the performance of paid campaigns, detailing aspects like reach, clicks, and conversions.

Competitive Analysis:

LinkedIn Analytics allows you to gauge your performance against competitors, offering insights into what works well in your industry and highlighting areas for improvement.

Personal Branding:

For individuals, analytics can be used to fine-tune personal branding efforts, ensuring that your LinkedIn profile is being discovered by the right people, for the right reasons.

Types of LinkedIn Analytics

Understanding the different types of LinkedIn Analytics is crucial for harnessing the platform’s full potential. Here’s an overview of what LinkedIn Analytics covers for business pages, personal pages, and LinkedIn Ads.

Business Page Analytics

Business Page Analytics on LinkedIn provides comprehensive data about your company’s LinkedIn page. This includes insights into post performance, follower demographics, page traffic, and engagement trends.

How to Access Business Page Analytics on LinkedIn:

Navigate to your company page.
Click on the “Analytics” tab which will offer dropdown options such as Visitors, Updates, and Followers.
Each section provides specific metrics related to that aspect of your page’s performance.

Personal Page Analytics

Personal Page Analytics focuses on your individual profile’s performance. It tracks metrics like profile views, post engagement, and search appearances. This helps you understand how your content resonates with your network and beyond.

How to Access Analytics for your Personal Profile on LinkedIn:

Go to your LinkedIn profile.
Click the “View profile” button.
Scroll down to your dashboard, which is private to you, to find data on profile visits, post views, and more.

LinkedIn Ads Analytics

LinkedIn Ads Analytics is vital for measuring the effectiveness of paid campaigns. It provides detailed reports on ad performance including impressions, clicks, engagement, and demographic information of the audience that interacted with the ads.

How to Access Metrics for Ads on LinkedIn:

Click the “Advertise” icon from the LinkedIn toolbar to open LinkedIn Campaign Manager.
Select the account associated with your ads.
View detailed analytics for each campaign or ad set, which will include metrics like conversion rates and cost per result.

These various analytics tools offered by LinkedIn provide valuable insights that can help you tailor your strategies for personal branding, content creation, and advertising, maximizing your impact on the platform.

LinkedIn Business Page Analytics

When you open up the Analytics dashboard from your business page, you’ll see a row of tabs that group different metrics together. Within each of these tabs (Content, Visitors, Followers, Leads, Competitors and Employee Advocacy), you can select specific dates, export data, view graphs to visualize performance, and access more detailed tables underneath for granular insights.

Content

Understanding the Content Analytics on your LinkedIn Business Page is crucial for optimizing your content strategy to better engage your audience and increase visibility. This section of LinkedIn Analytics provides a comprehensive view of how your posts perform, which in turn helps in tailoring your future content to meet the interests and needs of your followers.

Key Metrics in Content Analytics:

Impressions and Reach: This metric shows the number of times your posts were seen. Impressions count every instance a post appears in someone’s feed, while reach indicates the number of unique viewers.

Engagement Rate: Calculated by dividing the total number of interactions (likes, comments, shares) by the number of impressions. This metric gives a clear picture of how actively engaged your audience is with your content.

Clicks: This includes the total count of clicks on the content, company name, or logo. It helps in understanding what drives curiosity and encourages further exploration of your content or company profile.

Social Actions: Detailed insights into likes, comments, and shares for each post. This helps in identifying what type of content resonates most with your audience, fostering more of these interactions.

Video Views and Viewer Retention: For video content, LinkedIn provides metrics on how many viewers watched the video and how long they watched it. This is essential for analyzing the effectiveness of video content and optimizing the duration and quality.

Followers Gained from Posts: Some posts may attract more followers. This metric allows you to see which content is effective at growing your follower base.

Analyzing Content Performance in the Highlights and Trends Section

The Highlights and Trends section offers a snapshot of your content’s performance over a specific period. Here you can see peaks in engagement and identify successful posts that could inform your future content strategy.

Trend Graphs: Visual representations of engagement trends over time. These graphs help in pinpointing when your content has the highest impact.

Top Performing Posts: Insights into which posts achieved the most engagement, impressions, or clicks. This section is crucial for understanding what type of content your audience prefers.

Utilizing Content Analytics for Strategy Optimization

To effectively use these metrics:

Regularly Monitor and Analyze Trends: By keeping track of how different types of content perform, you can adapt your posting strategy to optimize for the most engaging content types.

Experiment with Different Content Forms: Based on analytics, test various forms of content (articles, videos, images) to see which generates more engagement and why.

Schedule Posts According to Engagement Patterns: Analyze when your content receives the most engagement and schedule posts during these optimal times to maximize visibility.

Refine Targeting Based on Audience Insights: Utilize demographic data from engagement reports to tailor your content to the specific interests and professional fields of your audience.

Visitors

Visitor Analytics on LinkedIn provides a detailed view of who is visiting your company page, even if they haven’t followed you yet. This section of analytics is essential for understanding the reach and impact of your LinkedIn presence beyond your immediate followers. It offers insights into the behaviors and demographics of your page visitors, helping you tailor your marketing strategies to better attract and engage potential followers.

Key Metrics in Visitor Analytics:

Page Views and Unique Visitors: This metric tracks the total number of views your page has received and distinguishes them from unique visitors, giving insight into the breadth and repeat engagement of your audience.

Visitor Demographics: LinkedIn provides a breakdown of visitors by job function, industry, company size, and seniority. This information is crucial for understanding who your content is reaching and tailoring your messaging to better resonate with this audience.

Engagement Metrics: Including the number of clicks on your company name, logo, or any custom buttons you have set up on your page. This data helps gauge what elements are effectively drawing attention and interaction.

Mobile vs. Desktop Visits: Insights into the devices your visitors are using to access your page, which can influence how you design and optimize your content for different platforms.

Analyzing Performance in the Highlights and Trends Section:

The Highlights and Trends section in Visitor Analytics provides a summary of key data points over selected time frames. This snapshot allows you to quickly assess whether your page is gaining traction and where improvements can be made.

Traffic Sources: Understanding where your visitors come from—whether through LinkedIn search, external search engines, or direct visits—can help you optimize your outreach strategies.

Activity Peaks: Identifying times when your page sees the most activity. This information can be used to schedule posts or updates strategically to maximize visibility.

Leveraging Visitor Analytics for Strategic Planning:

To make the most out of Visitor Analytics:

Optimize for High Traffic: Adjust your content release and page updates around peak visiting times to enhance engagement.

Tailor Content to Visitor Demographics: Use demographic insights to develop targeted content that appeals to the primary industries, job functions, and seniority levels of your visitors.

Improve Page Layout for Device Preferences: With data on device usage, redesign your page or adjust content to offer optimal viewing experiences on both mobile and desktop.

Enhance Visibility Through SEO: Analyze traffic sources and increase efforts on channels that are underperforming or double down on those that are driving the most traffic.

Followers

Follower Analytics on LinkedIn gives you a detailed snapshot of the individuals or entities that follow your company page. This section is crucial for understanding who your content is resonating with and for tailoring your marketing strategies to maintain and grow your follower base effectively.

Key Metrics in Follower Analytics:

Total Followers: Tracks the total number of followers over time, allowing you to gauge growth trends and the effectiveness of your engagement strategies.

Follower Demographics: Like Visitor Analytics, this metric breaks down your followers by job function, industry, company size, and seniority. It also includes geographical data, showing where your followers are located, which can be particularly useful for global brands.

Follower Trends: This includes data on net followers over a selected period—new followers minus any unfollows. It helps in understanding what events or content led to an increase or decrease in followers.

Follower Sources: Identifies where your new followers are coming from, whether through LinkedIn suggestions, your company’s website, or other sources. This can help you optimize your outreach channels.

Analyzing Follower Performance in the Highlights and Trends Section:

The Highlights and Trends section for followers offers visual graphs and charts that make it easy to understand the dynamics of your follower base at a glance. Here, you can see:

Growth Rate: Quick visual insights into how your follower base has grown over time compared to previous periods.

Top Growth Drivers: Analysis of which content or campaigns have resulted in the highest number of new followers, providing a direct link between your output and audience growth.

Utilizing Follower Analytics for Engagement and Growth:

To leverage Follower Analytics effectively:

Segment Your Audience: Use demographic insights to segment your audience and create more personalized content that speaks directly to different groups within your followers.

Monitor Growth Trends: Regularly check your follower growth trends to understand what strategies are working and which aren’t, allowing you to pivot as necessary.

Tailor Content Strategies: Analyze the correlation between spikes in follower growth and specific content or campaigns to replicate successful strategies in future planning.

Expand Reach Strategically: Use data on follower locations and industries to target new markets or double down on areas with strong support.

Leads

Leads Analytics in LinkedIn offers a granular view into the leads generated through LinkedIn features like Lead Gen Forms attached to your LinkedIn Ads. This section is particularly valuable for businesses focused on B2B interactions, as it provides crucial data on potential customers and their engagement with your marketing efforts.

Key Metrics in Leads Analytics:

Lead Generation Forms Performance: Tracks the performance of specific Lead Gen Forms, showing how many leads are being captured through each form. This allows for direct assessment of the form’s effectiveness in engaging potential leads.

Lead Quality: Provides insights into the quality of the leads based on engagement levels and conversion rates. This helps in determining which leads are more likely to convert, allowing for more focused follow-up strategies.

Demographics of Leads: Like other analytics segments, this provides detailed demographic information about the individuals who have filled out your forms, including their job function, industry, and location.

Conversion Rates: Monitors how many of the leads have taken a desired action beyond just filling out a form, such as signing up for a webinar or downloading a white paper. This metric is essential for measuring the ROI of your LinkedIn advertising efforts.

Analyzing Lead Generation in the Highlights and Trends Section:

The Highlights and Trends section for leads offers a concise overview of your lead generation efforts over time. It typically includes:

Lead Volume Trends: A graph or chart showing the number of leads generated over specific periods, which can be vital for understanding seasonal fluctuations or the impact of specific campaigns.

Top Performing Lead Gen Forms: Identifies which forms are performing best in terms of lead capture, helping to refine the approach for future form deployments.

Leveraging Leads Analytics for Enhanced Conversion Strategies:

To effectively use Leads Analytics for improving your business outcomes:

Optimize Lead Gen Forms: Use performance data to tweak the questions in your Lead Gen Forms or the design and placement of the forms themselves to increase conversion rates.

Tailor Follow-up Communications: With detailed demographic data on leads, customize your follow-up communications to address the specific needs and interests of different demographic groups, enhancing the chances of conversion.

Analyze and Adapt Content Offers: Evaluate which types of content (e.g., white papers, case studies, webinars) are most effective at converting leads and adjust your content strategy accordingly.

Set Clear Conversion Goals: Define what actions you consider as conversions (e.g., sign-ups, downloads, purchases) and measure your leads against these goals to truly understand the effectiveness of your lead generation strategy.

Competitors

Competitors Analytics on LinkedIn allows you to benchmark your company’s performance against similar organizations in your industry. This feature is invaluable for understanding your competitive landscape and identifying areas where you can differentiate and excel. By monitoring the activity and performance of competitor pages, you can gain strategic insights that inform your content and engagement strategies.

Key Metrics in Competitors Analytics:

Follower Count Comparison: See how your follower growth compares to competitors over time. This metric helps gauge your visibility and brand strength relative to your peers.

Engagement Rates: Analyze how engaged a competitor’s followers are compared to yours. This includes interactions per post, which can signal the effectiveness of content strategies across different pages.

Content Performance: Gain insights into what types of content are working well for competitors, including post frequency, types of posts, and the engagement they receive.

Growth Trends: Track how quickly competitors are gaining followers and engaging users, helping you identify industry trends and successful strategies.

Analyzing Competitor Performance in the Highlights and Trends Section:

The Highlights and Trends section provides a visual and data-driven comparison of your performance relative to selected competitors. Key features include:

Side-by-Side Metrics Comparison: Visual graphs and charts that compare your page’s performance metrics directly against your competitors, making it easy to spot trends and opportunities.

Top Performing Posts from Competitors: Review which posts are achieving high engagement on competitor pages, offering insights into content themes or strategies that resonate within your industry.

Leveraging Competitors Analytics for Strategic Advantage:

To effectively use Competitors Analytics:

Identify Benchmarks: Establish benchmarks based on competitor data to set realistic and ambitious goals for your page in terms of growth, engagement, and content effectiveness.

Spot Opportunities: Look for gaps in competitors’ strategies where your page could offer unique content or better engagement. This could be a particular time of day when competitors are less active or content formats they are underutilizing.

Refine Your Content Strategy: Adapt your content strategy based on what is successfully driving engagement on competitors’ pages. This might involve emulating successful post types or addressing topics that are currently underserved by competitors.

Innovate Based on Trends: Use industry trends found in Competitors Analytics to innovate and stay ahead. If all competitors are focusing on a particular content style or theme, consider how you can take a fresh approach or advance the conversation.

Employee Advocacy

Employee Advocacy Analytics on LinkedIn provides insights into how employees are interacting with and promoting your company content on their personal LinkedIn profiles. This form of advocacy is a powerful tool for amplifying your brand’s reach and credibility, leveraging the networks of your team members. Understanding the impact of your employees’ engagement can help optimize your overall LinkedIn strategy.

Key Metrics in Employee Advocacy Analytics:

Employee Shares: Tracks how often and which employees are sharing your company’s content. This metric helps identify your most active internal advocates.

Engagement from Employee Shares: Measures the engagement (likes, comments, shares) that content receives when shared by employees, indicating the effectiveness of these shares.

Reach Expansion: Estimates the additional reach your content gains through employee shares, comparing it to what is achieved through the company page alone.

Conversion Rates: For companies with specific calls to action (CTAs) in their posts, tracking how many leads or conversions are generated from employee-shared content can provide insights into the effectiveness of employee advocacy.

Analyzing Performance in the Highlights and Trends Section:

The Highlights and Trends section for Employee Advocacy offers a detailed look at how employee interactions with company content are contributing to broader engagement goals:

Activity Over Time: Shows trends in how frequently employees are sharing content and the resultant engagement metrics over selected time periods.

Top Advocates: Identifies which employees are most active in sharing content and generating engagement, helping to recognize and potentially reward these key contributors.

Leveraging Employee Advocacy Analytics for Enhanced Engagement:

To effectively utilize Employee Advocacy Analytics:

Encourage Participation: Develop programs or incentives that encourage more employees to share company content. Highlighting the benefits of building a professional brand on LinkedIn can also motivate participation.

Tailor Content for Sharing: Create content that is not only relevant to your company but also appealing for employees to share. This might include highlighting team achievements, company milestones, or industry insights.

Monitor and Mentor: Use analytics to identify employees who could potentially improve their advocacy effectiveness. Offer training sessions or resources on how to effectively use LinkedIn for professional and company growth.

Evaluate Impact: Continuously assess the impact of employee advocacy on reaching key marketing goals, such as increased brand awareness, lead generation, and recruitment efforts.

Personal LinkedIn Page Analytics

Personal LinkedIn Page Analytics offers individual users detailed insights into how their content and profile are performing on the platform. This tool is invaluable for professionals looking to enhance their personal brand, increase network engagement, and understand their visibility on LinkedIn.

Key Metrics in Personal Page Analytics:

Profile Views: Tracks the number of times other LinkedIn members have viewed your profile. This metric is a good indicator of your visibility and attractiveness in your network or industry.

Post Views: Measures the visibility of your individual posts, providing insights into which topics or types of content resonate most with your audience.

Search Appearances: Shows how often your profile appears in LinkedIn searches, giving you an idea of how well your profile is optimized for relevant keywords in your industry.

Engagement Metrics: Detailed breakdown of likes, comments, and shares for each post, helping you gauge the interaction level and what drives engagement with your content.

Accessing Personal Page Analytics

To view your Personal LinkedIn Page Analytics:

Navigate to your LinkedIn profile.
Click on the “View profile” button.
Scroll to your dashboard which includes sections like “Who viewed your profile”, “Post views”, and “Search appearances”.

Creator Mode:

Creator Mode on LinkedIn is an optional feature designed for individuals who wish to grow their audience and increase their influence through content creation. When activated, Creator Mode modifies the profile to emphasize followers over connections, prioritizes the display of your original content, and adds more discoverability options for your profile in relevant searches.

Additional analytics with Creator Mode include:

Content Performance Insights: Creator Mode provides enhanced analytics on the performance of your posts and articles directly on your profile dashboard, allowing you to see detailed engagement metrics such as views, likes, comments, and shares.
Audience Growth Data: It offers insights into follower growth trends, helping you understand how your content is driving increases in your audience size.
Demographic Information: You get a breakdown of follower demographics, including job titles, industries, and regions, which can inform more targeted content creation.

LinkedIn Ads Analytics

LinkedIn Ads Analytics provides advertisers with a variety of reports that are critical for evaluating the success of their campaigns. These reports are designed to give detailed insights into various aspects of ad performance and delivery, helping marketers optimize their strategies and improve return on investment.

Types of LinkedIn Ads Reports and Their Metrics

Performance Report:

Metrics include impressions, clicks, conversions, click-through rate (CTR), and cost per click (CPC). This report focuses on how effectively your ads are reaching and engaging the audience.

The performance report helps in understanding the overall effectiveness of the campaign and in making decisions on whether to scale or adjust the ad spend.

Delivery Report:

In the Delivery report, you’ll see spend over time, frequency (how often ads are shown to the same person), and reach (the number of unique users who saw the ads).

Delivery provides insights into how ads are distributed across your targeted audience and the efficiency of your spending.

Conversion Report:

Conversion metrics include conversion rate, cost per conversion, and lead generation specifics (such as form fill-outs). This report is essential for tracking the ultimate effectiveness of the campaign in driving actions.

The purpose is to evaluate the ROI of campaigns and to understand how well different creatives or messages drive user action.

Demographic Report:

With Demographics, you’ll see breakdowns on age, job function, seniority, company size, location, and industry of the audience that interacted with your ads.

The Demographics report assists in refining target audiences based on who is most responsive to your ads, allowing for more tailored future campaigns.

Click Demographics Report:

Metrics here include detailed breakdown of who is clicking on your ads, segmented by various demographics.

Click Demographics enables you to drill down into which segments of your target audience are most engaged, providing insights for future ad targeting.

These reports can be accessed through the LinkedIn Campaign Manager, where you can customize the time range and other parameters to get the most relevant data for your analysis. Utilizing these detailed reports, marketers can gain a deep understanding of how their advertisements are performing across different segments and adjust their strategies for maximum impact and efficiency.

How to Create LinkedIn Analytics Reports

Creating and exporting LinkedIn Analytics reports is essential for tracking the performance of your Business Page and LinkedIn Ads campaigns. These reports can help you visualize trends, assess the impact of your content, and refine your marketing strategies.

Creating Reports For Your Business Page

Navigate to your LinkedIn Business Page.
Click on the “Analytics” tab in the menu bar to access different analytics options such as Visitors, Updates, and Followers.
Choose the specific analytics feature you want to report on (e.g., Visitors, Updates, Followers).
Set the time range and any specific filters you need for your report. LinkedIn allows you to customize the data you want to include based on your requirements.
After setting up your filters and viewing the data, look for an “Export” button or link, usually located at the top right of the analytics overview.
Click on this button, and you will typically have options to export the data as a CSV or Excel file. Select your preferred format and download the report.

Creating Reports For LinkedIn Ads

Log into your LinkedIn Campaign Manager.
Select the account and the specific campaigns you want to analyze.
Within Campaign Manager, navigate to the “Analytics” section.
Here you can choose to view performance, demographics, or conversions reports. Set your desired time range and other relevant filters.
Once you’ve customized the view with the metrics you need, find the option to export the data, typically found near the data visualization or at the top of the page.
Select “Export” and choose the file format you prefer, such as CSV, XLSX, or PDF. Confirm the export to download the report to your device.

Best Tools to Use for Tracking LinkedIn Metrics

LinkedIn offers some nifty and fairly in-depth metrics right on its platform. But the analytics dashboards can be difficult to customize, and you end up needing to export data into clunky spreadsheets to get the insights you need.

So, when it comes to monitoring and optimizing LinkedIn metrics effectively, selecting the right tools is crucial. Among the various options available, Locowise stands out as the number one choice for several reasons.

Comprehensive Analytics: Locowise provides a detailed analysis of LinkedIn Page performance, offering insights not just into basic metrics like followers and engagement rates, but also deeper analytics such as reach, impression trends, and demographic details of the audience. This level of detail is essential for businesses aiming to understand the full impact of their LinkedIn activities.

Competitor Analysis: One of the standout features of Locowise is its ability to track competitor performance alongside your own. This comparative analysis helps businesses identify strengths and areas for improvement based on industry standards or competitive benchmarks.

Customizable Reporting: Locowise allows users to create custom reports that are tailored to the specific needs of their business. This flexibility ensures that you can focus on the metrics that matter most to your strategy, making it easier to report back to stakeholders with relevant and actionable insights.

User-Friendly Dashboard: Despite the depth of data provided, Locowise offers a clean, intuitive interface that makes data accessible even to those who might not be deeply familiar with analytics. This user-friendliness enhances the efficiency of monitoring and decision-making processes.

Predictive Analytics and Strategic Recommendations: Beyond just tracking and reporting, Locowise also offers strategic recommendations based on the data collected. These insights can guide users in refining their LinkedIn strategies to better engage with their audience and achieve higher ROI.

Want to try it out? Start a free trial of Locowise today!

Track LinkedIn Analytics Effectively and Generate Custom Reports in Double-Time

Having access to quick, comprehensive, and actionable LinkedIn analytics is key to refining your social media strategy. Locowise offers a robust solution that not only tracks all your essential LinkedIn metrics but also simplifies the process of creating custom reports. With Locowise, you can easily monitor engagement rates, follower growth, and ad performance, and compare these metrics against competitors to stay ahead in the market.

Streamline your analytics process and make informed decisions faster with Locowise’s user-friendly interface and powerful data visualization tools. Whether you’re looking to enhance your content strategy, boost your ad performance, or gain deep insights into your audience demographics, Locowise has the tools you need to succeed.

Leverage white-label reporting, predictive analytics, hashtag analytics and more – Start your free trial of Locowise today.