If your company uses LinkedIn for business, then tracking LinkedIn analytics should be an integral part of your strategy on this social platform. That’s because analytics tools help marketers track different social media metrics and report back on successes.
But, why does that matter?
Tracking LinkedIn analytics is essential when it comes to quantifying your social media marketing efforts, and providing the data you need to improve your social media ROI and reach social media goals. After all, if you aren’t tracking data, you’re just guessing whether your brand is meeting its goals.
In other words, with LinkedIn analytics, you can say with certainty when you’ve hit a new milestone, like record audience growth, engagement or conversions.
In this complete LinkedIn analytics guide, you’ll:
- Learn how to use LinkedIn analytics.
- Discover the best LinkedIn metrics to track.
- See a few analytics tools that can deliver deeper insights and make reporting simple.
Let’s learn how to start tracking your company’s metrics on LinkedIn!
Bonus: Download a free guide that shows the 11 tactics Hootsuite’s social media team used to grow their LinkedIn audience from 0 to 278,000 followers.
How to use LinkedIn analytics
To start, know that you can begin tracking LinkedIn analytics natively or with a third-party LinkedIn analytics tool, like Hootsuite. And the route you go depends on your social media marketing strategy.
If your brand only uses LinkedIn, you’ll find all the data you need in LinkedIn itself. If your brand is active on several social media platforms, a third-party tool like Hootsuite can be more efficient. It shows you performance metrics across all social channels in one place.
To access the LinkedIn analytics dashboard, start by logging in to your LinkedIn profile. Then, open up the LinkedIn company page you manage. Note that page analytics are only visible to page admins, or at minimum, people with “analyst” access.
As long as you have the right permissions and access, you will be able to monitor your LinkedIn metrics.
There are 5 types of LinkedIn page analytics:
Update analytics
These metrics demonstrate how effective your LinkedIn updates are, whether your followers find them engaging, and help social media managers see trends and patterns. For example, if your update analytics are showing low post engagement, you can try altering the time you schedule posts to publish, or try changing the type of content that’s published.
To streamline the publishing of your LinkedIn posts to improve your brand’s update analytics, a scheduling tool like Hootsuite can help. As well as showing you the best days and times to publish content, you can schedule posts to fit in with your other social posts, bulk schedule or auto schedule.
Here’s more detail:
In LinkedIn analytics, you’ll also see update highlights, which is a snapshot of the important metrics. The highlights show the number of total likes, comments and shares in the last 30 days, as well as the percentage change from the previous 30 days.
Follower analytics
These metrics highlight who is interacting with your page content and updates. Knowing more about followers can help you create content that speaks directly to your audience, improving engagement and increasing traffic.
LinkedIn shows you this data based on your followers’ location, job, seniority, industry they work in and company size.
(Find out more about important LinkedIn demographics here.)
Visitor analytics
These are very similar to follower analytics. These numbers show you who is coming to your page, but aren’t loyal followers of your brand on LinkedIn — yet!
In other words, having demographic data showing who is visiting your page can help your brand spot patterns and tailor its updates to those visitors. That could result in visitors converting to new followers, increasing social engagement.
Using a scheduling tool like Hootsuite is one way to reach those new audiences. When you track LinkedIn analytics to determine which posts are performing best, you can use Hootsuite to promote them as sponsored content.
Here’s how promoting content on Hootsuite works for LinkedIn and Facebook:
Employee advocacy analytics
According to LinkedIn Help, employee advocacy analytics “provide page admins of a LinkedIn Page the opportunity to gauge trends in employee and member engagement with content recommended to employees on the My Company tab.”
This includes metrics like the number of recommendations made for employees connected to your brand’s LinkedIn page and the number of comments by LinkedIn members on employee posts.
Talent brand analytics
These metrics are available to super admins managing LinkedIn Career Pages. If one of your LinkedIn social media goals is to attract new talent to your company, tracking these metrics could be useful.
LinkedIn post analytics
You can also drill down on the metrics for a specific post by clicking Show stats in the bottom right corner of a post:
LinkedIn profile analytics
If you offer professional services from your LinkedIn profile rather than a page — or if you act as a brand ambassador for your company — you may want to also track profile analytics. These stats can be found from your profile, under Your Dashboard.
The best LinkedIn metrics to track
There are countless LinkedIn metrics available to marketers, but does that mean you should be tracking, monitoring and reporting on them all?
Simply, no. That’s a lot of data.
Which LinkedIn metrics you should track depend on the marketing goals you set. For example, if your brand is experimenting with thought leadership articles and trying to engage new audiences through its published posts, keep an eye on update analytics. If you want to grow brand awareness on this platform, track followers and visitors analytics.
If you’re brand new to monitoring LinkedIn metrics, start simple. Here are some basic metrics you should be tracking.
Update metrics to track
Impressions
This metric lets you know the total number of times your LinkedIn update is visible for at least 300 milliseconds. This tracks when the post is also, at minimum, 50% in view to a user that’s logged into LinkedIn.
You might also want to track unique impressions. This is the number of times your post displays to individual signed-in members. (Unlike impressions, unique impressions won’t count when a user sees the same post multiple times.)
Reactions, comments and shares
These engagement metrics count the number of times your post received a reaction, comment or share.
Reactions are used to display different emotional responses to your content. Users can select different emojis to show that they like, celebrate, support, love, feel the post is insightful or feel curious about the content you share.
Shares is the number of times a user decides to share your content with their own LinkedIn following, expanding your post’s reach.
And comments is the number of user comments left underneath your post:
Clicks
A click tells you your call-to-action worked. In other words, a user engaged with something of yours on LinkedIn, instead of just scrolling past it.
On LinkedIn, clicks are counted when a signed-in member clicks on your post, company name or logo. It does not include other interactions like shares, reactions or comments.
CTR, or click-through rate, is a metric shown as a percentage that divides the number of clicks your post receives by the number of impressions it got — it gives you a better idea of its engagement.
Engagement rate
LinkedIn calculates engagement rate by adding the number of interactions, clicks, and new followers acquired, divided by the number of impressions the post receives.
Follower and visitor metrics to track
Follower metrics
Followers analytics measure the number of people who would like to stay connected with your brand. Important metrics your brand should monitor include:
- Number of followers over time: This shows how the number of your brand’s followers has increased (or decreased) or a set amount of time.
- All followers: The total number of current followers your business page has.
- Companies to track: This is useful for comparing companies similar to yours.
You can also track follower demographic data to get a sense of who your loyal followers are, where they work and their professional level of seniority.
Visitor metrics
This shows key metrics about the visitors coming to your LinkedIn page, but who aren’t following you in order to see your updates regularly. Important metrics your brand should monitor include:
- Page views: The total number of times your page was visited.
- Unique visitors: How many individual members have visited your page, giving you a good indication of how many people are interested in your company.
- Custom button clicks: Your business profile can include a custom button, including ‘Visit website,’ ‘Contact us,’ ‘Learn more,’ ‘Register,’ and ‘Sign Up.’ This metric shows you how many clicks your custom buttons receive in a set amount of time.
Employee advocacy metrics to track
Metrics from employee advocacy analytics might not be of interest to you if you’re just starting out with your LinkedIn business page, but depending on your social media goals, there are important metrics here to track too.
You can track:
- The change in the number of recommendations.
- Posts from recommendations.
- Reactions to posts.
- Comments on posts.
- Reshares of posts.
LinkedIn profile metrics to track
Finally, know that you can also track LinkedIn metrics without a business profile. If you’re using the platform as a business influencer or to share thought leadership articles, for example, you can track the following to determine how your content is performing:
Search appearances: This is the number of times your profile appeared in search results during a given period.
Premium accounts will get more in-depth information, including who those users are, what they do at the company they work at, and the keywords they used to find you.
Post views: This is an overview of the number of non-unique views your posts, documents or articles have received. Click on this LinkedIn metric for a post-by-post breakdown and to see insights like reaction, comment and share details.
3 useful LinkedIn analytics tools
Sometimes when it comes to analytics tracking and reporting, you want more depth and more efficiency than the native LinkedIn analytics option offers. These LinkedIn analytics tools allow you to dig deeper, streamline your workflow and optimize your metrics reporting.
Hootsuite Analytics
If your company is active on multiple social media platforms as part of its social media strategy, consider Hootsuite to optimize your posting and analytics reporting. By connecting your LinkedIn account to Hootsuite, you can not only schedule posts in advance and at optimal times, but you can also measure how your LinkedIn analytics compare to your other social metrics.
Hootsuite analytics lets you:
- Track, monitor and compare metrics for your brand’s multiple social accounts from one place.
- Set performance benchmarks, making it easier to work toward improving on your goals.
- Create customizable, clear-to-read reports that are easy to share with your team.
Learn more about Hootsuite analytics and how it can streamline your brand’s tracking of all its metrics here:
Hootsuite Insights by Brandwatch
This social listening tool gives your brand useful metrics around the conversations happening about your brand on LinkedIn. In a nutshell, this tool helps your brand “hear” in real-time what others are saying about your brand on social media — and better understand brand sentiment — by monitoring mentions and highlighting trends.
Tracking these metrics will help your brand monitor its reputation, get involved in important conversations and know what keywords are being used in connections with your business.
Learn more about this analytics tool here:
Hootsuite Impact
This analytics tool can be used to measure the value of your social efforts, including those on LinkedIn. Hootsuite Impact is our enterprise-level analytics tool: it goes beyond vanity metrics, such as likes, to clearly show how social is impacting the business by showcasing the entire customer journey.
For example, see how someone goes from clicking on your LinkedIn post to making a purchase. Or from reading your LinkedIn update to signing up for your newsletter.
Know that Hootsuite Impact integrates with other metrics tools like Google Analytics, and metrics can be broken down and analyzed by timeframe or by campaign.
Learn more about Hootsuite Impact here:
For more information on using LinkedIn for business, check out our step-by-step guide.
Easily manage your LinkedIn Page alongside your other social channels using Hootsuite. From a single platform you can schedule and share content—including video—and engage your network. Try it today.
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