A B2B marketer’s guide to LinkedIn analytics

LinkedIn may have gained its reputation as a professional networking and job search platform, but its benefits in social media marketing especially in the business to business realm can’t be overlooked. When weighing the benefits of adding LinkedIn to your social media strategy consider these three metrics:

Conversions

Measuring conversions is a key metric important to any organic or paid social media strategy. Conversions allow you to measure the actual actions followers or page visitors are taking and can include anything from making a purchase on your store website, signing up for a newsletter or email list. From here, you can decide whether posts or targeted ads with these prompts are actually rendering the results you want. To track conversions on LinkedIn you’ll need to:

• Choose where you want to track conversions by selecting a page on your company’s website, then enter your high-level domain into LinkedIn’s Campaign Manager
• Install LinkedIn’s Insight Tag to your website to track conversions for your campaign
• Create a conversion action so LinkedIn knows what you want to count as a conversion (e.g. signing up for a newsletter, filling out a form)
• Measure your conversion performance through LinkedIn analytics

Demographics

The demographic metrics LinkedIn provides can help validate you’re getting your content in front of the right people, better understand your audience and target ads and campaigns to those you really want to reach. LinkedIn provides specific demographic information about a user’s professional background than other social media platforms, which makes it an ideal place for B2B marketers. Through LinkedIn analytics, you can use demographics to target ads and see information about who follows your page.

• LinkedIn ads can be targeted by industry, job title, job seniority, job function, company size, location, country, and company.
• Demographics of followers include country, region, job function, seniority, industry, company size and employment status.

Lead generation

According to Content Marketing Institute, 85 percent of marketers named lead generation as their top content goal. Creating a LinkedIn group is an easy and effective to way to generate leads organically, but paid content is another option. LinkedIn offers the ability to generate the cost-per-lead so you can compare spend and effectiveness to other lead generation strategies.

To get the most out of LinkedIn lead generation:

• Optimize your profile by making sure it’s completely filled out and contains as much information as possible about your company
• Create a LinkedIn group, invite potential customers and post trending industry news and topics
• After successfully engaging with those in the group, connect with them and convert these connections into leads
• Utilize LinkedIn’s pre-filled lead gen forms for Sponsored Content or Sponsored InMail