How does LinkedIn's Analytics Work?

It's Easter, and it's an amazing time to share that God loves you!

Since we started this journey of setting up your LinkedIn organisation page, I always ask, 'How is your page doing?' and I'm sure the first thing that comes to mind is how many likes and comments there are. Well, today we will be talking about how to understand LinkedIn’s analytics to efficiently track your progress.

As we've established, it’s important to target the right people and include the right keywords to attract them. So, how do you know you are reaching the right audience? How do you know if people are engaging with your content or even visiting your page, and how are you doing in comparison to your competitors?

N/B: Look out for my monthly newsletter for more on this, as I will be sharing bits so this article won’t get boring.

HOW DO YOU FIND THE ANALYTICS TOOLS?

If you use a desktop:

• Go to your company page on LinkedIn.
• Look for the Admin view, which might be on the left sidebar or accessible through a drop-down menu (depending on the current LinkedIn layout).
• Once in the admin view, you should see an Analytics tab on the left-hand side. Clicking this will take you to the LinkedIn analytics dashboard.

For the mobile app:

• Open the LinkedIn app and go to your company page.
• Tap on the Insights tab.

When you open the dashboard, you will see six metrics listed. I will write about one, and we’ll look into the others later. They are content, visitors, followers, leads, competitors, and employee advocacy. Now, let's delve into the insights you can find in the Content section. In this section, you get to see how well your post, article, or video is performing. Are the right people seeing your content? And so on. Here, you'll encounter a range of metrics that offer nuanced insights into your content's performance:

1. Impressions: This metric represents the total number of times your content has been displayed to LinkedIn users. This includes all LinkedIn users, not just your followers who see your posts. It could be the number of people who see your content, or someone likes your post and it pops up on their connections' feed, or someone searches for a keyword and your post shows up as a result. The best example is when you do a Google search and several pages show up. You don't view all, but some pages show up. It also serves as an indicator of your content's reach and visibility on LinkedIn.
2. Unique Impressions: Unlike total impressions, unique impressions focus on the number of individual users who have viewed your content. Your content didn’t just pop up, and the audience scrolled past, but it was viewed. This metric offers insight into the breadth of your audience and their level of engagement with your posts. So, I ask, what impression do you want “first-timers” who interface with your content to get?
3. Clicks: As the name implies, this is the number of clicks your content receives, which reflects the level of interest it generates among viewers. Tracking clicks enables you to assess the effectiveness of your content in driving traffic to external links or specific landing pages. If people aren’t clicking, then they are probably not interested in your content or you are not telling your story right.
4. Reactions: We certainly know this metric—how many people liked, loved, supported, laughed, shared, commented, or reposted your content. Monitoring reactions provides insight into how your audience perceives and interacts with your content on an emotional level. Interestingly, you could have high clicks and impressions but low reactions. If this is you, then you need to work on emphasising the CTA (call to action). As an organisation, encouraging your volunteers and employees to react to your content would prompt others to do so. It is just as in physical interactions; people are always looking for who will respond first. That's why it's common to see people like posts with high reactions already.

If you have noticed, these metrics are ordered in the stages of how people interact with your pages from the first time until they find your content to offer value and choose to interact with your post. Therefore, have these stages in mind when creating your content.

I’ll have to stop here for today; next week, I’ll cover engagements and highlights. Check out these analytical tools and think of ways to make changes now that you understand what they mean.

Next month is April, and I am looking to connect with startup NGOs, community projects, and social enterprises, Let us grow together.

Until next week, Happy new month!