Breaking Down The New LinkedIn? Newsletter Statistics

I had heard these were coming, and finally got them in late February. Let’s dive in and see what they tell us. In today’s newsletter I take the hard numbers as provided by LinkedIn?, and add a lot of conjecture on my behalf as to what those numbers mean.?

For background, I have 27,000 subscribers to my LinkedIn? Newsletter.

These stats are for the Feb 18 issue of my LinkedIn? newsletter, after the issue had been out one week.?

Discovery

According to LinkedIn?, “Impressions” represents the number of times my post was shown on LinkedIn?, and “Members reached” represents the number of distinct members that saw my post.

I have several observations about the Discovery statistics.

LinkedIn? calls it my “post” but it was in fact my Newsletter

From the fact that the Impressions number is larger than the Members reached number, it is obvious that some people are being presented my Newsletter multiple times. This is not out unusual. How many times have you returned to your homepage to find the same post sitting at the top that was there the last time you looked?

I also find it interesting that the important number - the number of distinct people who had the opportunity to see my newsletter, gets second billing to the larger number of impressions.?

I received seventy-five hundred impressions which, nominally, is very good. This is on top of the distribution I get from my subscribers, and it is worth noting that my newsletter usually gets double the impressions one of my posts does. I say this number is nominally good as this reach is completely unstructured as far as I am concerned. Who my newsletter is being put in front of could be anyone.?

So in summary, these additional impressions are nice, but it’s very difficult to figure out how nice they are.?

Article Performance

This part can be a little confusing. Let’s start with the “Email sends” and “Email open rate.”?

“Email sends” is the number of my subscribers who were sent an email. Subscribers can specify if they want to be notified by email or in the app or both. In my case, just under half of my subscribers have indicated they want to be notified by email.?

Here are the observations I can draw from these figures:

• My 5,775 article views are the total number of times someone clicked to open my Newsletter. That would put my nominal open rate from all sources at around 21% for this issue.?

• 30% of those 12,561 that were notified by email opened the Newsletter. That would be around 3,500 people.?

• If 5,775 people opened this Newsletter and 3,750 of them did so after seeing the Email, then 2,000 people that were notified In App opened the Newsletter. That’s around a 14% open rate (2,000 out of 14,500 who opted for the In App only notification).

• So the open rate for people notified by email - 30% - is twice as high as the open rate for people that opted for the in app notification. And this makes sense, as only maybe 20% of LinkedIn? users logged on in the week since this issue was published, while around 100% of email users logged on to their email in the last week (put another way, 14,500 people were notified via the In App notification, but how many of those 14,500 people actually logged onto LinkedIn? in the last seven days and were in a position to see the notification?)

• Also muddying the waters is the fact that among those 2,000 other people, will be some people that discovered the Newsletter in their Homepage feed - some of those 7,508 impressions must have resulted in opens.

So what are the takeaways from all these statistics and my admittedly tortured math??

LinkedIn? appears to promote my Newsletters more in the feed than they do my posts. My newsletters typically get twice the distribution that my posts do.???

Notification by email is a powerful tool, both for me and for LinkedIn?. That notification triggers a lot of users to log in to see my Newsletter. That may partially explain why LinkedIn? is so high on newsletters, but it also makes me feel confident (well, as confident as you can around here) that Newsletters will have staying power.?

So, what have I missed here? What conclusions would you draw from these new stats??

Today’s newsletter is a shorter version of my email newsletter. I usually publish one of the four articles from my email Newsletter on LinkedIn?. Today’s email Newsletter also included articles on How I Generated Hundreds Of Sales Leads Using Content On LinkedIn? , How I Handle Trolls, and Subscribers On LinkedIn? Are Gold: Here Are 9 Ideas For Getting More. If you are interested in this deeper weekly dive into Using LinkedIn? Effectively, here’s a link to the signup page: https://www.practicalsmm.com/free-email-newsletter/

This week All Access members will also get 3 Possible Reasons You Got Ghosted On Your Job Application.

The obligatory disclaimer: I do not work for or have any business association with LinkedIn? other than being a user who pays for a Sales Navigator subscription.