If you are in the B2B industry, chances are that the majority of your target audience is on LinkedIn. However, do you keep track of how it actually engages with your company? Today, we will see some of the best LinkedIn metrics and KPIs that all businesses should track.
Types of LinkedIn metrics
LinkedIn provides companies with a lot of valuable metrics and key performance indicators to help them measure their organic presence on the platform.
These metrics can be summed up into 4 big sections:
- Reach – this small groups revolves mainly around impressions. In other words, the number of times that your content is seen by LinkedIn users on their feed. This group is tightly related to the number of followers and their interaction with your content, but not only.
- Engagement – this is the biggest group of metrics, and it helps you measure how people who are reached by your content engage with it. However, it is important to know that these people are not exclusively your followers.
- Demographics – LinkedIn Analytics provides you with valuable data on the demographics of your audience. Where are they from? What is their job function? In what industry do they work in? These are only a few of the questions that you will be able to answer with this data.
- Competition – how does the engagement of your followers compare to the one of your competitors´? Are they increasing in followers faster than you? Are they uploading content with more frequency than you? LinkedIn can provide you with some really good insights regarding competitor companies.
So, now that we have these groups in mind, let’s dive a little bit deeper:
Reach
Before we move on to discussing the metrics, there is one really important thing that I need to explain.
And that is,
How LinkedIn algorithm’s works.
This is very important to understand because many companies are surprised by their reach compared to the number of their followers. Many times, this surprise is positive; however, a lot of other times it can be very negative.
How is it possible that my content is seen by only 200 people if I have over 2000 followers? I mean, people are following me because they want to see my content, right? So why are they not seeing it?
Good point! If users are following your Company page, it means that they are willingly joining your community to receive updates from you. So, it is only logical that they do, right?
Well, what you have to understand is that a single LinkedIn user can:
- Have more than 1000 first connections, and even more second connections. Of course, there are also many users with less connections, but also many with over 10,000;
- Be a member of more than 10 LinkedIn groups;
- And can also follow at least 50 different Company Pages.
Of course, I am just throwing some made-up, possibly-average numbers. But the point is, there is so much content going on out there, that it is impossible to see everything.
So, much like Instagram and Facebook, LinkedIn’s algorithms are designed to prioritize content that:
- You are most likely to interact with;
- Is the most relevant to your interests, skills, or job function;
Generally, LinkedIn will rank your content considering factors such as the reputation of your account, the engagement of your audience with your previous publications, and what other content is being posted:
Source: LinkedIn.com
Impressions
Now that we have a better understanding of LinkedIn’s algorithm, it is time to see the first key performance metric when it comes to reach.
Impressions are the number of times that a publication appears on LinkedIn’s feed, and is seen by the professional community. For example, having 1600 impressions means that your post appeared 1600 times on LinkedIn:
This metric is essential to measure because it shows how relevant your content is to your audience. For example, let’s say that you have a huge following of over 50,000 users, but your posts barely reach 1,000 impressions on the regular.
This is quite possibly a sign that the content that you are providing isn’t exactly what your audience wants to receive. Which is completely okay! After all, it takes time to get to know your audience. Especially on a new social media channel.
Of course, there aren´t only negative surprises when it comes to Impressions. Sometimes, certain publications can “blow up” in popularity, exceeding their reach beyond the actual number of your followers.
Now, I am not going to enter into detail about how to make LinkedIn´s algorithm work for you. Otherwise, we will take forever to get to the next point as it is a whole other topic. 🙂
However, if you are looking for more information, just click here. Falcon has done a great job explaining in detail the platform´s algorithm, and what you can do to improve the reach of your posts.
Testing
Every time you post a new update, LinkedIn will show it to a few of your followers to see how they react. If they interact with it, it will show you to more users. And then more, and so on.
Generally, the more people interact with your content, the higher reach you will have within and beyond the community that follows you. Which will translate into more impressions!
On the contrary, if the few people who saw your content didn´t interact with it, LinkedIn will not continue showing it further. Or just to a few more followers before it stops showing it.
Unique impressions
One of the most interesting LinkedIn metrics and KPIs that not many people pay attention to are unique impressions.
We already saw that regular impressions are the number of times that your post was shown to LinkedIn members. However, a single user can see the same publication multiple times on his feed over a certain period of time.
Unique impressions exclude the revisits of a user to your post. In other words, if he saw your update 10 times on his feed, it will only count one impression instead of 10 impressions for each time he saw the post.
You can check the number of unique impressions for your posts by going to the LinkedIn Analytics section of your Company Page.
Go to Analytics – Updates:
And then select Unique Impressions from the drop-down menu of the Metric section:
This metric is very important to track because it gives you a much better idea of how many people you are actually reaching with your content. While impressions is a great way to see your oveall reach, it is significantly less precise.
Reaching the same user 5 times with the same post can improve your overall engagement. However, it doesn´t help you much when it comes to knowing how many people you are reaching.
Engagement
The biggest, and undoubtedly one of the most important group of LinkedIn Metrics and KPI, is the Engagement one.
Engagement metrics are all the possible ways in which LinkedIn members can interact with your company and your content. So, let’s see them:
Reactions
Recently, LinkedIn introduced something that Facebook incorporated first a long time ago: reactions.
If before you could only like a LinkedIn update, now you can show a little bit more “emotion” by reacting to it:
Reactions are an important key metric to observe because they show how users feel about your content. Compared to Facebook, LinkedIn doesn’t have negative reactions such as being angry or crying, but it can still give you some interesting insights.
The number of reactions shows how many people feel some kind of way about your updates. Many users just endlessly scroll down to see if something catches their eye. So, if they bothered to stop and like your content usually means that they aren’t indifferent to it.
Unfortunately, LinkedIn Analytics doesn’t show us how many reactions of which type we got. But it’s still a meaningful insight that you can observe and analyze to see what kinds of updates people prefer more than others on LinkedIn.
So, pay attention to it, test various kinds of content, and takes notes on the ones that are getting the highest interaction. After all, each social media channel is different, so you will need to adapt your updates to what people want to see.
You can also check the fluctuations of your reactions in LinkedIn Analytics – Updates – Metric: Reactions. This way, you can also gain insights on the best days of the week to get the highest engagement:
Click-through Rate (CTR)
The next on our list of LinkedIn metrics and KPIs is the Click-Through Rate, also known as the CTR.
The Click-through rate of a post shows the percentage of LinkedIn members who saw your post and clicked on it.
In the Digital Marketing world, CTR is one of the most important metrics for measuring users’ interaction with your content. However, it also provides information that likes or reactions don’t: intention.
Reactions can sometimes be very superficial. Many people who scroll down on their feed will often give a like to a post because it caught their attention for a second, but they won’t actually stop to read it and click on it.
Which can mean that they are not necessarily showing interest in learning more. Clicks, on the other hand, show this intention, and are much more significant when it comes to understanding user behaviour.
Although, I have to say that users often use likes to save content for later. I do that a lot. Once you’ve given a like to something, it will appear in your Activity where you can check it later:
For this reason, it is important to measure both reactions and CTR in order to fully understand your audience’ interest to your content.
CTR in Analytics
In LinkedIn Analytics, you can see the fluctuations of your clicks over a certain period of time:
Scrolling down in the same section, you can also see a more structured view of your CTRs per update. This way, you can have a better overview on which content works the best for your audience on LinkedIn, so you can focus more on it.
Obviously, I have censored the updates of the company that I am using as an example:
Of course, sometimes it’s not the content itself that people don’t like, but the way you present it.
For example, if your company has been to an event, using photos instead of a press release might significantly raise your CTR:
Comments
The next metric on our list is Comments.
And honestly, there isn’t much need to explain what comments are. They usually come from people who are so interested in your content that they want to share an opinion or a thought about it. Which, of course, can be either negative or positive.
On LinkedIn, Company Updates usually receive significantly less comments than posts from actual users. The reason why is because people come on this platform to network and interact with each other. So, one great way to do is in the comments section.
This doesn’t mean that you are not going to receive comments! And when you do, one really important thing that you always need to do is to respond to them.
Nothing screams a lack of professionalism than a comment that didn’t get any response from you. Especially if it is related to your products or services.
Shares
One of the most underused LinkedIn metrics is the number of shares on a single post.
From my experience, I haven’t seen many people actually sharing Company Updates. So usually, the ratio of shares to your total number of followers will be very, very low.
Because LinkedIn´s main purpose is to be a professional network, interactions between users are typically a much higher number than the ones between users and companies.
Of course, this doesn´t mean that users don´t interact with companies. I am just setting up your expectations for shares!
Clicks
This metric is probably the most straightforward one. It is pretty much self-explanatory!
Simply put, Clicks are really just the number of times that users click on your post to get more information about your content. If your update has a link to a landing page, the click will take your users to this landing page.
If your update only consists of images, the click will simply open the image in a bigger size.
The number of clicks is really important to measure, but it doesn´t mean anything by itself without the Click-through rate.
200 clicks might seem a lot until you realize that your update has received over 20,000 impressions. This makes your CTR just 1%!
In other occasions, 200 clicks might not seem as much. But if it´s over 2,000 impressions, then having a Click-through rate of 10% is definitely a great result! So, pay attention to your clicks, but always in the context of your followers and impressions.
You can also see the fluctuations of your clicks for a certain period of time in LinkedIn Analytics:
Engagement Rate
Engagement rate refers to the percentage of users who have made any interaction with your content, including:
- Shares;
- Reactions;
- Clicks;
- Comments.
In other words, it calculates the following ratio:
Total number of interactions / Total number of impressions = Engagement Rate
So, if your update had 1000 impressions and a total of 100 interactions, your engagement rate will be 10%.
Luckily, you will not have to calculate it by yourself, as LinkedIn does it for you for each post:
Engagement rate is one of the most important LinkedIn metrics and KPIs for your business because it shows the overall interaction of users with your content.
After all, each user will have a preferred way of interaction, so focusing only on clicks or shares will not show you the full picture. And you might end up making the wrong conclusions!
What is a good engagement rate on LinkedIn? Well, this will depend on the quality of your followers, your industry, the content type, and other factors. According to Aamplify, anything above 2% is a good starting point.
From my experience, I see that posts that only have images with no links tend to have a higher engagement rate. Which, of course, doesn´t mean that you should stop posting links. I am just sharing my observations.
Followers
Another key performance indicator to keep track of is the number of LinkedIn members following your Company Page.
You can find the exact number below the name of your organization on the Company Page:
This number is important, but do not over obsess with it to the point of doing bad practices. It needs to grow organically, even if it takes some time. After all, this is the natural process of transforming your target audience into a community on LinkedIn.
It is also important to keep in mind that the number of followers is directly related to your organic reach.
Unless your content is extraordinary, do not expect a huge reach if you are just starting to build your community. In fact, don´t be surprised if the majority of times your content only reaches 10-20% of your actual number of followers.
Page Views
A very interesting metric that not many companies keep track of is page views.
Page Views are the number of views by LinkedIn members across all tabs of your Company Page:
In other words, every time a user visits any tab of your Company Page, it will count towards yout total number of page views.
Although it´s not the most popular metric that companies look at, I think that it can give us very interesting insights. A lot of people use LinkedIn as a reference to check the corporate profile of a company, and to understand what their business is all about.
Which means that views can give you a good estimate of your overall brand awareness.
Because Company Pages are visible publicly, this metric shows how many people want to learn more about your company within and outside of your network. In comparison, the majority of other LinkedIn metrics that we saw are significantly more focused on your community of followers.
In LinkedIn Analytics, you can see how the fluctuations of your page views across desktop and mobile for a certain period of time:
Unique Visitors
Unique visitors exclude the revisits of your users to your Company Page.
In other words, if the same user visited multiple tabs of your Company Page, or visited the page various times during the day, all of these visits will only count as one, unique visit for that user.
Unique visitors are calculated daily, and are not de-duplicated over various days. In LinkedIn Analytics, you can see them by going to the Visitors tab, and switching from Page Views to Unique Visitors:
Demographics
Demographic metrics provide you with really helpful insights on the professional profiles of both your followers and your Company Page visitors.
To get data about Follower Demographics, just go to LinkedIn Analytics – Followers – and scroll down till the middle of the page:
You can also go to the Visitors tab and do the same exercise – the demographic criteria is exactly the same. However, the data will be different because not all your visitors are your followers, and vice versa.
In this section, you can see data such as:
Location
Where are your followers / visitors located? Are they mostly coming from the same city or country, or is their profile more international?
This data can be very useful for refining your content in a way that resonates with your followers.
Job Function
You can also obtain helpful insights about the professional profile of your current audience. Does it coincide with the profile of your target audience? In other words, are you reaching the right people with your content?
Seniority
Another interesting demographic criteria on LinkedIn is the Seniority of your followers or visitors. Is your content reaching professionals on a higher level of the hierarchy, or a lower? If you are trying to reach high-level professionals, but your demographics data screams “entry-level”, maybe you need to double-check your communication.
And see if your brand communication is delivered in a way that actually resonates with your target audience.
Industry
LinkedIn can also gives you awesome insights on industry data. Are your updates reaching your target industries?
Company Size
The last criteria on the list is company size. It shows you if people from small, medium-sized, or big companies are interested in your content.
Competition
And last but not least, you can see how your updates and followers compare to those of similar companies for a specific time range.
As you can see, I have censored the competitors of the company that I work at because it´s confidential information. But you can see the rest of the data!
One of my favourite LinkedIn metrics is the engagement rate, because you can see if you are keeping your community more (or less engaged) than your competitors.
Let´s say that you notice an engagement rate that is much higher than yours, or generally higher than the average. Don´t panic! Just go to the Company Page of this competitor, and see what they are doing better than you to make their community interact more with them. You can get some great insights from data like this.
I also like to keep track of the number of updates and its correlation to the number of new followers. If I see that they are gaining followers faster than me by publishing significantly more posts, it´s time to step up our content game!
On the downside, you can´t really select the companies that you want to get information from. LinkedIn decides that for you. So, if there is a competitor that you really want to spy on, but it´s not on the list, you won´t be able to get this information. Sorry!
LinkedIn Metrics: Conclusion
Now that we have a better overview of all the LinkedIn metrics available to us, it is time to put them into a good use.
Don´t just post updates without analyzing their performance. Always keep track of the LinkedIn metrics that are the most relevant for your business, and adjust your content and message accordingly.
Now it´s your turn! What metric did you find the most interesting? Are you already tracking all of them?
As always, thank you for taking the time to read my article, and I will see you in the next one!
