It is difficult to imagine a digital marketing professional or agency who could do their job without relying on LinkedIn for a range of different strategies and information. From raising brand awareness and finding the right kind of influencers to performing extensive market research, this is one of only a few platforms which are as relevant and useful today as they were years ago.
If we didn’t already know just how important LinkedIn data is to digital marketers of all profiles, conversations with our current users would have made the point patently obvious. So, here is a little bit about how to better use our LinkedIn Social integration, which allows you to easily track and report on the most important metrics related to your LinkedIn updates, followers and visitors.
A bit about LinkedIn
LinkedIn Analytics offers a straightforward interface which allows you to track the performance of your Company or Showcase pages and, if needed, modify your current promotional campaign. Since this is not something that you only need to do once in a while but rather on a daily or weekly basis, every click or minute you save in the process really adds up over time. You’ll see how Reportz allows you to make all of the data you need instantly available as soon as you create a dashboard.
To fully understand the convenience our automated reporting tool offers, here’s a short breakdown of how this data is presented in LinkedIn Analytics.
There are three main sections – Visitors, Updates and Followers.
Visitors analytics is, aside from offering a minimalistic highlights section with the number of total page views and unique visitors, mostly interesting for the graph that allows you to examine page views or unique visitors for your Company page or any of your Career Pages, for any period you might be interested in.
If you want to learn more about the types of visitors actually viewing your pages, you can see their breakdown according to categories such as job function, location industry, etc. While this data is useful when assessing if your campaign is targeting the right groups, the data describes your total visitors, i.e. it is not page-specific, but instead shows overall percentages.
Update analytics also has a small highlights section with the total number of likes, comments and shares for all of the updates in the selected period. Just below highlights, you can find the graph with metrics like impressions, clicks, shares, etc. again, not for specific posts, but for all of them combined.
If you do want to see some of the basic metrics for specific updates, you can do that by taking a look at the Update engagement table at the bottom of the page, which lets you see when a particular update was created, by whom, how many times has it been viewed, and how many shares, likes and comments it received.
Follower analytics, after listing the number of total followers and the number of those acquired in the last 30 days, offers a graph with the number of new followers – organic or sponsored – across any date range you choose to observe.
Just like with visitors, you are also given a chance to analyze the demographics data of your followers, grouped according to their location, job function, seniority, industry, or the size of the company they are working for.
Finally, the last table in the followers section – Companies to track, shows how your company compares to a range of similar ones in terms of total and new followers, number of updates, and engagement rates.
Concise does not Equal Clear
With these three main segments – Visitors, Updates and Followers, no one could accuse LinkedIn Analytics of being too obtuse or complicated, but there is also no shortage of those who would prefer having a more flexible and customizable interface.
Analyzing data pertaining to just one of these areas is rather straightforward, but if you need to make a comparison between two properties, or try and identify potential correlations between different metrics within the scope of a single campaign, you are forced to resort to spreadsheets and good old manual labor.
Matters get even more complicated if you dare to expand the scope of your research to other LinkedIn business solutions or to combine these insights with those obtained through other data sources, but before we even begin poking that particular bear, here’s a far simpler and more common scenario.
Let’s say that you want to do the most basic research and try to determine how the number of daily unique visitors and followers influences the engagements metrics for your posts. To do this directly from LinkedIn Analytics, you’d need to go to each of the three segments; export the relevant data, merge the three spreadsheets into something more manageable, and only then actually analyze the data. If you have to do this every couple of days, you’ll soon find you are wasting inordinate amounts of time on chasing data that could easily fit into a single, self-updating widget in Reportz.
In order to get this same set of data in LinkedIn Analytics, you’d first have to go to the Visitors tab and export the data on desktop and mobile page views; go to Followers and export the list of organic and sponsored ones; and finally, visit the Updates section to get engagement metrics for your posts. At this point, you’d have to combine the data from these exports, making sure not to mismatch it. While the most obvious benefit of creating a widget in Reportz instead of doing this manually is how much time it allows you to save, there is another important aspect to this integration.
Namely, organizing data in this manner allows you to notice correlations you might otherwise miss. For instance, aside from tracking different metrics for one of your Company pages, you could choose to display how different pages you are promoting have been performing in a particular period, with the focus on the exact metrics that you are interested in, nothing less, nothing more. This makes Reportz as useful for campaign performance analysis as it is for reporting automation.
While this might be enough for some, we always try to provide our users with that something extra, and in this case, this includes data from your LinkedIn Pipeline Builder, data which is not nearly as easy to access in LinkedIn as visitor, updates and followers data, and which you can import into your Reportz dashboards with amazing ease.
On their own, or combined with other data related to your campaign, metrics like Careers page banner promo clicks or Mobile careers page job clicks add a new level of sophistication to your engagement research, allowing you to track your visitors and followers much further down the line than you would have been able otherwise.
What our LinkedIn integration is missing and how to make up for it
There is some data available in LinkedIn Analytics that you can’t see in Reportz widgets. This includes visitor and follower demographics info, as well as update engagement overview. While you could, for the purposes of campaign performance assessment, simply use Reportz to show all of the other data you are interested in, and view these unavailable metrics directly in LinkedIn, if you need to have them in your dashboard, for reporting or simply for comparison, there are two ways to do that.
You can either export the data, or copy it directly from the table, and add it as a passive element in Reportz by choosing the upload CSV option.
Naturally, as it is added as a passive element, this data won’t auto-update, meaning you’ll have to repeat the entire process again once the numbers change. In order to skip the main portion of the process, and only be required to copy the data from LinkedIn Analytics to a Google spreadsheet, and have the rest of the work taken care of by our KPI dashboard utility, you’ll have to, you’ve guessed it, create a Google Sheets widget.
Let’s say you want all the update engagement data in your dashboard, and you’ll need to update it often. While you could also do a simple copy paste, this segment of data is much better covered in the direct LinkedIn export than the one dealing with follower demographics, which is why we would recommend you simply export the data, copy the resulting table in a Google Sheet that you have connected with Reportz, and have the widget displaying this data update as soon as you click “paste” and re-submit the widget.
And there you have it, any time you want your dashboard to show current update engagement data, all you have to do is update the data in spreadsheet and ensure that the widget registered the change. Naturally, doing things this way means that you get even more control than you would directly with LinkedIn Analytics, as you can choose to delete all the data you don’t need before even showing it in Reportz, making your reports or research as concise and to the point as they can possibly be.
All that’s left is to try it
We hope that we have managed to illustrate how you can use Reportz to get a completely customizable layout for all the LinkedIn social metrics for your company pages. If some of the steps seem too complex or time consuming, you can click on the button below to take Reportz for a test drive, and compare the amount of time you need to invest when using LinkedIn to access this data, to the time it takes when using Reportz. We know you’ll be pleasantly surprised.
