How to use LinkedIn analytics for published posts effectively

When I first started blogging 12 years ago I was obsessed with traffic statistics. Whenever I published a new blog I'd hit F5 hundreds of times in a row excitedly waiting for the visits to increase. In time I discovered new parts of the dashboard and was thrilled to learn that people from all over the world were reading my posts.

What started as a confidence boost (five people from Papua New Guinea are reading my blog!) has transformed into an essential knowledge base that allows me to access insights that help me improve my content. Sure, I still feel that buzz when I see traffic soar on a post - but analytics platforms allow me to learn a lot more than just how many people are reading my blog. 

That's why I was so excited when LinkedIn released their analytics dashboard for published posts on LinkedIn earlier this month. Publishers can now learn more about their readers and where they came from, helping us understand why some posts do better than others.

How to use LinkedIn analytics for published posts effectively

Today I want to show you how to use LinkedIn analytics for authors effectively, using a post I published back in January (My First 90 Days: 5 Things All Businesses Can Do To Help New Employees) as an example. 

Page views

LinkedIn articles publicly show the number of views a post has received, so I know this article had received 2,030 views to date. Publisher analytics takes this one step further so you can see how well your post did over different time-frames.

If I take the date back six months you can see a huge spike:

That spike unsurprisingly occurred shortly after I published the blog. Views have been practically non-existent since January, but when I adjusted the date just to look at the last 30 days, I saw another spike:

I found this interesting because just before this spike in traffic occurred I had published another LinkedIn article which linked through to this post. The spike accounted for 14 views in the last week which suggests 14 people had clicked through to this post from my new article.

With data like this you can calculate an estimated click-through rate. In this instance there's a CTR of just over 1%, and as I feel that's rather low, I can now reconsider where to insert links in future posts to increase that percentage. 

Demographics of your readers

It's great to understand not only who your readers are, but also where they come from. With LinkedIn analytics you can learn the top four industries, job titles, locations and traffic sources for each individual article you post.

Industries and Job Titles
If you've written an article to appeal to a specific audience you can see how well you've achieved your goal by looking at the most popular industry and job titles. For instance, if you've written a post to appeal to those working in social media, you'd want to see 'Online Media' appear under industries and 'Social Media Manager' under job titles. 

Locations
What amazed me with this article was how few visitors were London based (I live and work in London, as do the majority of my LinkedIn connections). London based traffic usually accounts for 70% of my traffic, so this is quite the anomaly. To understand why, traffic sources provides an answer.

Traffic Sources
Having the post in question featured on LinkedIn Pulse was a huge confidence boost - and it accounted for 85% of the views. It also explains why so much traffic came from outside London (mystery solved!) as LinkedIn users around the globe can access the same Pulse content as my London network.

Who's responding to your post

The last thing you can see in author analytics is who has liked, commented on or shared your post. 

From these numbers you can calculate engagement rates which you can then compare against other articles. My favourite part about this section is that you can 'View Share' and see any additional comments sharers have added about your post before sharing with their network. You can then see how many people liked each share and any comments that were left on the shared article instead of your original article.

I'm a huge fan of LinkedIn analytics already and can't wait to delve deeper into the stats. If you're already using LinkedIn author analytics, have you found it helpful?

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Carla Bradman writes a London lifestyle blog and is the marketing manager at Paramount.

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