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9 Key LinkedIn Metrics to Use in Your Marketing Strategy
To create a truly effective marketing strategy on LinkedIn, you need to measure how your efforts are performing—this is where LinkedIn metrics come into play. These metrics provide valuable insights into how your audience engages with your content, what are the traffic drivers, and which strategies work the best.
In this blog, we’ll explore nine critical LinkedIn metrics that can boost your marketing strategy. From analyzing impressions to tracking profile views and conversion rates, we’ll break down the most important metrics every marketer should track to improve their LinkedIn performance.
By the end of this post, you’ll be able to make data-driven decisions that take your LinkedIn marketing efforts to the next level.
Top LinkedIn metrics worth tracking
Performing better on LinkedIn is about understanding how your content connects with your audience and how far your brand’s message is spreading.
Here are 9 LinkedIn metrics that can give you the insights you need to make your LinkedIn strategy more impactful:
1. Visitor Demographics
Visitor demographics gives you insights into who is checking out your profile or company page. It’s like a behind-the-scenes look at your audience.
Understanding visitor demographics helps tailor your content marketing strategy to better reach the right audience. If you're targeting specific industries or seniority levels, this metric can help confirm whether your content is attracting your desired audience.
How to track it:
To track LinkedIn visitor demographics, you must follow the following steps:
· Go to your LinkedIn profile or company page and open Analytics & Tools.
· Choose a date range (7 to 365 days) for insights on new followers and demographics.
· See total followers and daily growth trends.
· Check top demographics by job title, location, industry, seniority, company size, or company.
LinkedIn provides detailed data on the industries, job functions, and locations of visitors so that you can understand your audience and plan your targeting strategy.
2. Competitor Metrics
Competitor metrics let you see how your brand is performing compared to your competitors on LinkedIn. This will let you know how your target audience is expecting and engaging with. If you are one of the leaders amongst your competitors, you know you're doing something right, if you're falling behind, it's an indication that you should relook at your strategy.
How to track it:
Here’s how to track competitor metrics on LinkedIn:
· Go to your page’s settings and include competitor pages in your analytics. Now you can compare their followers and posts with your metrics.
· View your page’s all-time followers and new followers gained during the selected time range.
· Track organic engagement for your page’s posts within the selected time range.
· See the top trending posts from your competitors in the last 30 days, updated daily, to track what content is resonating in your industry.
Pro Tip: Use Sprinklr's competitive benchmarking tool to track social performance against competition across 8 social channels.
Sprinklr’s competitive benchmarking tool helps you gain deeper insights with AI-powered analysis of content strategies, sentiment, and audience behaviors. Compare your brand to competitors, automate reports, and set alerts to stay on top of key trends and performance metrics.
3. Engagement Rate
Engagement rate tracks your audience's interaction with your content by monitoring all engagement actions, including likes, comments, and shares.
An impressive engagement rate is a clear sign that your content is hitting the mark! It shows your audience is not just watching but enjoying and interacting with what you post. Think of it as a signal to double down on what's working, while you continuously refine your content strategy to keep the momentum going.
How to track it:
You can find engagement metrics in the post analytics section on LinkedIn. Content analytics on LinkedIn allows page admins to track engagement trends among their followers through detailed metrics on page content performance.
Pro Tip: Struggling to keep track of social media engagement across different platforms and measure up against competitors? Without a unified view, it can be challenging to understand how your social content performs on LinkedIn compared to other channels. Try using a social media analytics tool to view engagement metrics across all your social media accounts in one place.
Read More: 7 Social Media Engagement Strategies with Examples
4. Follower Growth
Follower growth helps you understand how your follower count is changing over time. Are you gaining new followers, or are you losing them?
Growing the number of followers is essential for making your brand more visible on LinkedIn. A steady increase means people are interested in what you have to say.
How to track it:
LinkedIn does not allow you to view a full list of your Page followers. However, as a LinkedIn page admin, you can access follower analytics to gain insights into your followers and shape your engagement strategy.
· Total followers and new followers over the last 365 days, with Premium data on followers from Premium features.
· Follower growth over time, including auto-invites for Premium users.
· Follower demographics by location, seniority, job function, industry, and company size.
· List current followers, their employers, and follow dates, with options to filter by people or pages.
5. Lead Generation
Lead generation captures the number of qualified leads you generate from your LinkedIn profile or company page. Unlike B2C companies that have more luck on visual platforms like Instagram, LinkedIn is the perfect place to reach out to B2B audiences.
This metric directly measures the effectiveness of LinkedIn in driving potential business opportunities. It’s crucial for businesses using LinkedIn to generate leads or sign-ups through campaigns, showcasing how well your calls to action are performing.
How to track it:
To track lead generation, you must have a lead gen form set up on LinkedIn. Navigate to your Page Analytics or Campaign Manager to monitor the number of leads generated through the form. You can track lead generation on LinkedIn by using a variety of methods, such as:
· Use LinkedIn Page Analytics under the ‘Visitor Analytics’ and ‘Updates’ tabs to analyze which posts attract attention and potentially drive organic leads.
· Enable LinkedIn’s Conversion Tracking in Campaign Manager to track website actions, such as form submissions or downloads, using the LinkedIn Insight Tag.
· Leverage LinkedIn Sales Navigator to identify, track, and engage potential leads, and monitor connection interactions to gauge lead interest.
6. Click-Through Rate (CTR)
CTR is a direct indicator of how effective your content is at driving traffic or encouraging action. A higher CTR means your content is compelling enough to prompt users to act, making it a valuable metric for understanding the success of campaigns with specific goals, such as lead generation.
You can calculate CTR by dividing the total number of clicks by impressions.
How to track it:
LinkedIn provides click data in the analytics section of each post. To track CTR, simply divide the total number of clicks by the number of impressions and multiply by 100 to get the percentage.
7. Comment Sentiment
Comment sentiment measures the positive, neutral, or negative feelings/reactions of comments left on your posts.
Comment sentiment provides insights into how your audience feels about your content. Positive sentiment means your content is well-received, while negative sentiment may indicate a need for content adjustment.
How to track it:
Use Sprinklr’s social listening tool to analyze comment sentiments with AI-driven insights and social listening. By setting up personalized dashboards and filters, you can effectively monitor sentiment and use the data to refine your LinkedIn strategy.
8. Video views and watch time
Video views are the total number of times your video was watched for more than 2 seconds. Watch time is the total amount of time people have spent watching your videos.
These metrics show whether people are interested in your video content, and if they're watching it all the way through. It’s a great way to know if you’re making videos that people want to see.
How to track it:
On LinkedIn, go to the post with the video. Click on “View Analytics” to see both the number of video views and time viewed. LinkedIn breaks down watch time into total minutes watched and average watch duration.
Pro Tip: Create a content calendar to track and assess the performance of your content across multiple metrics. A content calendar helps in planning, organizing, and scheduling your content in advance. By mapping outposts, articles, videos, and updates, you ensure a steady, consistent stream of content that aligns with your brand's goals and engages your audience effectively.
9. Content downloads
This refers to the number of times a piece of content (e.g., whitepapers, case studies, documents) shared on your LinkedIn page is downloaded.
Content downloads reflect interest in your valuable resources and help you gauge how well your content is driving deeper engagement and offering value.
How to track it:
This metric can be tracked through LinkedIn’s Campaign Manager for posts containing document ads. These insights help you measure the impact of your Document Ads by understanding member interest and engagement with your document.
3 popular LinkedIn metrics that are not useful
While LinkedIn provides a wealth of metrics, not all of them are equally valuable. Here are some metrics that are often seen as vanity metrics and are not as critical to track for effective marketing strategies:
1. Impressions
The total number of times your content has been displayed in users' feeds and search results. Impressions can be misleading. You could have a high impression count but a low click-through rate, meaning that your content is not captivating users enough to click through to your website or profile.
Focus instead on:
Click-through rate (CTR) provides a more accurate assessment of how effectively your content attracts users and drives them to act.
2. Post likes
The number of times users have liked your LinkedIn posts. While likes can be a positive signal, they don't necessarily translate to meaningful engagement. A post can receive many likes without generating meaningful comments, shares, or website clicks.
Focus instead on:
Comments and shares indicate a deeper level of engagement and reflect how much your audience is interacting with your content.
3. Profile Views
The number of times your LinkedIn page has been viewed. While page views can give you a general sense of your page’s visibility, they don't always reflect genuine interest. People may be browsing your profile without actually engaging with your content.
Focus instead on:
Website clicks are a better indicator of how effectively your profile is driving traffic to your website and generating leads.
Why LinkedIn metrics are important
With over 900 million members, LinkedIn has become the top platform for B2B marketing and lead generation. In fact, 94% of B2B marketers use LinkedIn for content marketing, making it a key channel for sharing expertise and thought leadership. However, simply posting content isn’t enough to ensure success.
LinkedIn metrics offer essential insights into your marketing efforts and enable you to make informed decisions to optimize your content, engagement, and lead generation.
The biggest problem is how to calculate all these Linkedin metrics in a single tool.
You can use third-party tools like Sprinklr Social to track all metrics for Linkedin and other social media channels. It also enhance your insights, you can create a more effective and impactful LinkedIn strategy that delivers significant results.
Remember that metrics are not a standalone solution. It's crucial to use them in conjunction with your broader marketing goals and to continually adapt your strategies based on the data you gather. Finally, focusing on audience analysis can help you make data-driven decisions that foster a more engaged community surrounding your brand.
Frequently Asked Questions
LinkedIn's algorithm uses metrics like engagement rate, click-through rate, and share rate to determine which content is most valuable and relevant to users. Content with higher engagement is more likely to be displayed in users' feeds.
Company pages typically focus on metrics like website clicks, lead generation, and engagement rate. Personal profiles might focus on metrics like connections, recommendations, and content views.
Use LinkedIn Analytics to compare your performance to industry benchmarks. Many industry reports and articles provide average engagement rates, click-through rates, and other key metrics that you can use as a baseline.
Paid promotions can boost your reach and engagement, potentially increasing your organic metrics. However, it's important to track the performance of both paid and organic content to understand the impact of each.
Some common mistakes in interpreting LinkedIn metrics are:
- Focusing on vanity metrics like follower count
- Not considering context
- Direct comparisons with competitors without accounting for industry and audience differences
