LinkedIn analytics has a lot of potentials to tap in. Do you know?

B2B marketing has a new fuel to run its machine, LinkedIn analytics. LinkedIn is a professional social media platform where businesses and individuals can network and connect. It has over 30 million companies and a target-rich environment which is ideal for B2B marketers.

To tap into the goldmine of usable data on LinkedIn, we need to understand what LinkedIn analytics brings to the table.

The Two W's – What And Where?

According to LinkedIn's internal research, approximately 63 million users scroll their feed every month. That is a ton of leads for B2B marketers. LinkedIn analytics consists of a set of metrics that can help you measure your company page's performance and how well the content posted on the page is working. This feature is nicely tucked inside a company's feed in the profile section, on the left-hand side. There are three main metrics – visitors, updates, and followers, and clicking on any of those will take you to your analytics dashboard.

Visitor Metrics

The analytics under the visitors' category will tell you where your monthly leads are coming from. It's a known fact that LinkedIn is way better than any other social media website at lead generation, it's a merit for B2B marketers to know the source of the visitors. This metric is further divided into the following:

Unique visitors – Visitors may land on your page many times to read about the company, find your website, message you, etc. But the unique visitors metric doesn't take into account repeated visits by the same person. It will calculate the number of unique people that have visited your page to show a truer picture.

Pageviews – This is pretty straightforward. This will calculate how many visitors viewed your page. No engagement, just eyeballs.

Visitor Demographics – This is great to find out if your campaigns are working on the targeted demographic. You can see the makeup of the company size, job level, location, etc., which will help you understand where your leads are coming from.

Follower Metric

Just like any other social media platform, the follower category will show you who is following your page for updates. These can be people or companies who want to know the developments of your company. This metric is further broken down as follows:

Total followers – Total followers is the total of everyone who has followed you since the time of your page's inception.

Gain or loss – This is a graph that shows how many followers the page has gained or lost in the span of a month.

Organic followers – These are the people who have followed the page through organic reach. They either searched for your page or came across your page via a mutual connection.

Sponsored followers – Opposite to organic followers, these are people who followed the page via a paid promotion or an ad.

Follower demographic – This option gives you a breakdown of the page's follower demographics. You can choose to get information on the basis of location, job function, seniority, industry, and company size.

Follower trends – This sub-metric tells the time from when the followers added your company page.

Company Updates Metric

This is where you will get a bigger picture of how the page is performing. It will show you the unique impressions which is the total number of eyeballs on the post, the engagement rate which refers to the clicks, likes, comments, shares on the posts, and followers. You can also see the video views here which will tell you how the videos have performed and highlight the number of reactions. The confusing bit in company updates are clicks and CTR (click-through rates), which are different. Clicks represent the total number of clicks you get and CTR tells how many clicks the page has received per impression, which determines how engaging your content is.

Here's How You Can Make The Most Of These Metrics

Now that you know what the metrics are, none of it will matter if you don't know how to use them.

1. Improve Your Content Strategy

Get an idea about the page's demographic and analyze what your followers will like to see. Visitor and follower demographics will help you understand what topics of conversations are relevant to your audience. These insights will help you churn out better content that will increase the engagement, impressions, shares, clicks, and overall exposure of your business. You can build a dynamic content strategy to deliver results.

2. Make Better Ad Campaigns

LinkedIn analytics will provide you insights into how your sponsored posts and ads are performing. You can test various creative ads and see what works best with your audience through visual metrics. If the objective of your campaign was to get more followers, you can check the growth rate and take a comprehensive look at the overall performance for greater ROI.

3. Analyze The Marketing Performance

LinkedIn analytics is a great way to analyze the performance of your updated marketing strategies. You will know if you are targeting the wrong audience, or if you're winning by getting more engagement and clicks. Even if the new strategy is not working as expected, you can immediately make changes to stop further damage.

4. Be Competitively Alert

Through the follower metric, you can see if your competitors are gaining more followers than you. You can also know if their content strategy is working better and make amendments to yours accordingly.

LinkedIn analytics will give you a clear idea about the performance of your page which you can compare with your competitors. You can make the most of these insights by optimizing your content and ads on LinkedIn to get more business visibility and potential leads for better ROI. With fewer funny animal videos and more business talk, you can scale up your company with the LinkedIn analytics feature.