LinkedIn analytics: How to analyze and improve your organic performance [template included]

LinkedIn is the biggest B2B social media platform with:

722+ million users,

55+ million active companies, and

96% of B2B content marketers use LinkedIn for organic social marketing.

It’s fair to say that if your B2B company is not using LinkedIn, you’re missing out on the chance to reach your target audience and grow your business.

However, being active on LinkedIn is just half the battle. You need to understand what works best for your brand and what doesn’t. In short, you need LinkedIn analytics.

That’s why we’ll show you how to use LinkedIn analytics to optimize and improve your organic performance.

Psst! If you’re interested in analyzing the performance of your LinkedIn Ads, check out our post about how to optimize your LinkedIn Ads campaigns instead.

But before we get into the analytics part, let’s take a step back and answer the most important question.

Why’s your business active on LinkedIn in the first place?

Having a clear understanding of what you’re trying to achieve on LinkedIn helps you pick the right metrics. Good metrics tell you:

• If you’re achieving your goals
• How you can improve your performance

For example, people often consider impressions, likes, and comments as vanity metrics. They’re often misleading, and they tell you nothing about your business. That may be the case if you measure ‘likes’ while your goal is driving more sales. Having a ton of likes on a LinkedIn post doesn’t guarantee sales.

However, if your goal is to increase community engagement, ‘likes’ shows if your audience enjoys your content.

So grab a pen and paper — if you’re a paper nerd like me — and write down your LinkedIn goals.

Ready? Let’s move to the next step.

What LinkedIn metrics should you track?

Now that you know what your goals are, choosing the metrics shouldn’t be that complicated. Essentially, LinkedIn provides a good amount of data about your:

• Page performance
• Followers
• Content performance

Page performance metrics

Page performance metrics tell you how your LinkedIn pages are performing.

Pageviews: The total number of times people visited your pages. There are several ways you can analyze your page view data. For example, you can break this down by home page, life page, or career page to see your most popular pages.

Let’s say you have a lot of views on the life page. You can make an educated guess that your followers may be interested in a career at your company. They want to learn more about your working culture.

Alternatively, you can split your page views by device. If you have many mobile page views, you should definitely optimize your content, especially videos and images, for mobile.

Page engagements: The total number of engagements people made on your page, for example, clicking on your logo, banner, or like your posts, etc.

Follower metrics

You can’t grow a LinkedIn account without growing your follower base. Keeping track of your followers help you understand:

• How fast your LinkedIn account is growing
• If you’re reaching your growth target
• Who your audience is

Here are some good follower metrics to track.

Follower count: How many followers you have.

Follower growth rate: How fast your account is growing. 

Country: Where your followers come from.

Industry: The industry your followers work in.

Seniority: Your followers’ working experience.

Job function: Your followers’ job function.

With the audience demographics data, you can:

• Check if you’re reaching the right audience
• Inform your ad targeting on LinkedIn. For example, you can target the same demographics as your followers or similar demographics in different regions.

Content performance metrics

Sure. You can brag about having a lot of followers on LinkedIn. But what’s the point of having 100K followers, and no one engages or cares about your content. Fortunately, you can find the metrics that tell you how engaged your followers are.

Impressions: The total number of times someone saw your posts.

Likes: The total number of times someone liked your posts. 

Comments: The total number of times someone commented on your posts.

Shares: The total number of times someone shared your posts.

Clicks: The total number of times someone clicked on your posts, including a click on a post or a click on a link.

Engagement rate: How engaged your audience is. It’s the ratio of engagements —including likes, comments, shares, and clicks— to impressions.

How can you analyze your organic LinkedIn data?

It’s time for a bit of a treasure hunt. We’re going to take a look at some ways you can analyze your LinkedIn data.

Keep track of your follower growth

Monitoring your follower growth helps you understand:

• Your LinkedIn account health. It shows you how fast your LinkedIn account is growing.
• Your content performance. Because good content will not only appeal to your existing followers but also attracts new followers.
• Follower growth rate benchmark. It’s easier to set targets for the coming months once you know your growth rate.

The easiest way to aggregate your follower data is to use a spreadsheet like Google Sheets or Excel. You can totally stick with the old, boring copy/paste to get your data, or you can automate the process with Supermetrics.

You can start a 14-day free Supermetrics trial for Google Sheets and Excel now.

Once you’re all set, go ahead and launch the Supermetrics sidebar.

Then run this query.

• Data source: LinkedIn company pages.
• Select pages: Enter the LinkedIn account you want to pull data from.
• Select dates: Set it to ‘Today’.
• Select metrics: Followers.
• Split by dimensions: Keep this empty.

Since follower count is a lifetime metric, you can’t split it by time dimensions. However, you can aggregate the data using this advanced setting.

• Filter: Keep this empty.
• Options: Navigate to the ‘Advanced setting’ field and type ‘APPEND_RESULTS’. Any refresh after this point will append the data to the bottom of the existing data.

Once you’re happy with your query, click on ‘Get data to the table’.

Your spreadsheet will look something like this.

Now that you have your follower data in one place, you can easily track your daily or monthly follower growth.

Make sure to set up the auto-refresh trigger to keep your data up-to-date.

Create a LinkedIn company pages dashboard

You probably agree that the LinkedIn reporting interface isn’t the best for monitoring your performance. Your data is scattered across different tabs, which makes it difficult to see the big picture at a glance.

To save you from all the hassle, we created a plug-and-play LinkedIn company pages dashboard for Looker Studio. With it, you can easily keep track of your performance.

The template consists of two pages: overview and followers. You can choose which page you want to see by clicking on the button.

Now we’ll walk you through each page and quickly explain what’s in it for you.

Overview

The ‘Overview’ page tells you how your organic LinkedIn strategy is performing.

You’ll find scorecards showing the key LinkedIn page statistics such as impressions, engagements, and engagement rate. Additionally, you’ll also see how many times people clicked, liked, or shared your content.

From here, you can quickly see how the metrics have changed compared to the previous period. Let’s say your engagement rate has been declining since the beginning of the month. You can improve your engagement rate by:

• Experimenting with different types of posts. You can use videos, polls, or slides.
• Reducing posting frequency per day. Typically, the second post on LinkedIn will cannibalize the impressions and engagements of the first post. So to maximize your engagements, you can post one per day instead of one every two hours. 
• Asking your teammates to interact with your posts. You can encourage your team to engage with your content by sharing a link with them after posting. For example, we have a slack channel called #haco (help a colleague out), a.k.a a “please like my post” channel.
• Trying long posts and hiding the link previews. As unconventional wisdom has it, LinkedIn wants to keep people on the platform, so this approach may do the trick.
• Including hashtags. Make sure to use relevant hashtags to increase impressions and reach.

Next, there’s a table showing your best-performing posts.

In this example, we split the best posts by ‘likes’, but you can choose whichever metrics and dimensions you want to track.

Understanding what makes your content great helps you double down on what works and kill off what doesn’t. When analyzing your content stats, ask yourself these questions:

• What’s the topic? Is it employer branding, product announcements, or blog summary?
• What’s the format? Is it a text post, poll, video, or infographic?
• What are the typical engagements? Do you have a lot of likes, comments, or shares?
• Should you tag any influencers or brands in your post?
• What are the hashtags that you should use?

Alternatively, you can use LinkedIn Ads to amplify your organic content and help it reach more audiences.

Finally, you’ll find a map showing where your followers come from.

Followers

Of course, the ‘Followers’ page tells you everything you need to know about your LinkedIn followers.

At first glance, you’ll see pie charts showing your followers by company size, seniority, and industry.

Next, there’s a bar chart showing your followers’ job functions.

Last but definitely not least, you’ll find a sparkline chart showing your new follower growth over time.

Measure your social media ROI

We believe that your social media marketing game plan doesn’t stop at LinkedIn. Perhaps, you’re also growing your brand affinity on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram. If that’s the case, you should create a social media mix dashboard to measure your performance across channels.

With it, you can see:

• Your social media ROI
• The channels that bring in the most conversions
• The channels that generate the most engagement
• Your best posts per channel

Psst, to learn more about measuring your social media performance, check out this blog post, where our friends at Journey Engine discuss social media ROI.

Getting started with the LinkedIn company pages dashboard

If you’d like to try out the LinkedIn company pages template, here’s how you can do that.

First, open the template. Then click on ‘Use template’.

Here, you’ll notice that the template pulls data from four different reports:

• Historical share statistics
• Follower details
• Update details
• Historical follow statistics

To activate the template, you need to create a new data source for each report.

Step 1: Under the ‘New data source’ field, click on the drop-down menu and choose ‘Create new data source’.

In the connector gallery, search for a connector called LinkedIn company pages by Supermetrics.

Next, complete the two-step authorization and give Supermetrics all necessary permissions.

Psst, by authorizing your account for the first time, you’ll start a 14-day free trial of Supermetrics for Looker Studio.

Step 2: In this window, you should choose the LinkedIn account and query type you want to get data from. First, we’re going to choose ‘Historical share statistics’.

Step 3: Now, click on ‘Next’ → ‘Connect’ → ‘Add to report’ → ‘Copy report’.

After adding the ‘Historical share statistics’ report, repeat from step 1 to step 3 to create a new data source for the other three reports.

Once you’re done, click on ‘Copy report’.

And that’s literally it. Your LinkedIn company pages overview performance report is ready to use. If you want to share the report with your teammates or clients, simply click on ‘Share’ and enter their email addresses.

Your turn

Remember, this is just the beginning. After reading this post, I hope you’ll think about different ways to analyze your organic LinkedIn data. Whenever you need inspiration, you can always check out our ready-made marketing templates.

If you want to bring your LinkedIn data to a spreadsheet, a BI tool, a data warehouse, or a cloud storage platform, you can start your 14-day Supermetrics free trial now.