How Can Your Brand Measure Success On LinkedIn? — Part 2

The Intermediate Guide

LinkedIn has fast become the world’s leading network of professionals and brands alike, making it one of the most promising social media platforms for businesses to gain new clients, increase their exposure to prospects and like-minded individuals, increase their sales, and drive their bottom line. Measuring your brand’s performance on the platform, is a quick and easy way to see if its helping to drive your business goals.

My previous article introduced you to the basic metrics most brands and individuals use to monitor and measure their success on LinkedIn. If you missed this article, you can read “How Can Your Brand Measure Success On LinkedIn? — Part 1 (The Beginner’s Guide)”, here.

In this article, I will take you through the basic of what you can find on the LinkedIn platform-specific analytics dashboard, while taking you though what are commonly referred to as vanity metrics. These sections should help you get a clearer picture of what you can and can’t measure on the platform, while giving you some insight into which metrics you should focus on to help you measure your performance against your business goals.

How Can Measuring Success On LinkedIn Help You Hit Your Company’s Revenue Targets?

In this article, I will cover…

#1 Getting Familiar With LinkedIn Analytics

#2 Understanding Vanity Metrics

Let’s get going…

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#1 Getting Familiar With LinkedIn Analytics

So as you should know, each social media platform has its own analytics dashboard, which allows you to track your efforts based on that site’s unique metrics. These dashboards may often be more reliable than relying on Google Analytics alone, as they dive a lot deeper into the metrics that matter for that specific site. LinkedIn’s analytics is no different. By familiarizing yourself with the basics of the site’s analytics dashboard, you can easily gauge your brand’s level of success in relation to your business goals on the site — and if need be, combine this data with your Google Analytics results to deliver a high-level, as well as a detailed performance report.

So what is LinkedIn analytics? What do analytics look like on LinkedIn? Well, as with many social media platforms, metrics available include followers, shares, clicks and impressions. But as you may have guessed, there are some metrics on LinkedIn analytics that not all other social media networks provide. While my previous article took you through the metrics you could use to monitor your personal and company page’s performance, LinkedIn offers analytics specifically designed for the monitoring of Company Pages, which I will take you through below.

What Can You Measure With LinkedIn Analytics?

1. Updates

LinkedIn provides a table showing your Company Page’s most recent updates with the following complimentary data:

• Preview — Shows the first few words of your post if it included text.
• Date — The date each update was posted.
• Audience — Indicates whether the update was sent to all followers or targeted.
• Sponsored — Shows which campaign(s) you’ve sponsored content in.
• Impressions — The number of times each update was shown to LinkedIn members.
• Clicks — The number of clicks on your content, company name, or logo. This doesn’t include interactions (shares, likes, and comments).
• Interactions — The number of times people have liked, commented on, and shared each update.
• Followers Acquired — How many followers you gained by promoting each update.
• Engagement — This percentage shows the number of interactions plus the number of clicks and followers acquired, divided by the number of impressions.

The platform also provides you with graphs to illustrate the following:

• Reach — The trend on the number of times your updates were seen both organically and through paid campaigns on a daily basis.
• Engagement — The number of times members clicked, liked, commented on, and shared your content in both organic and sponsored campaigns.

2. Followers

• Total — The total number of LinkedIn members following your Company Page. The number displayed here is updated only once a day, so it may be different from the current number on your Overview tab, which is updated in real time.
• Organic — Followers you gained without advertising.
• Acquired — Followers you gained through Sponsored Content and/or Company Follow Ads.
• Follower Demographics — A breakdown of who’s following your company using five types of demographic data: seniority, industry, job function, company size, and more.
• Follower Trends — Showing how your number of followers has changed over time.
• How You Compare — Your number of followers compared to other companies.

“How You Compare” is a good insight to include in a competitive analysis. You can also use it as a benchmark to set goals in your social media strategy.

3. Visitors

• Page Views — A graph showing how many times your Company Page was viewed.
• Career Page Clicks — If you have a Career Page, this graph shows you how many times viewers clicked various elements of your Career Page. This metric might be useful for someone in your Human Resources department who’s looking to see how much interest is being gathered by a job posting.
• Unique Visitors — A graph showing how many LinkedIn members visited your page, not including duplicate visits to a single page.
• Visitor Demographics — This is a graph showing a breakdown of who’s visiting your Company Page based on seniority, industry, function, and company size.

By understand more about your audience, you are able to gain insight into how better to engage with them, and what you can do to encourage them to help you meet your business goals on the site. As a brand, you should have an idea of who you’re speaking to — a buyer persona. Make sure your target audience is on LinkedIn by familiarizing yourself with the LinkedIn demographics that matter most.

The good news is that LinkedIn Analytics provides all the information you need to zone in on your target audience. With its Followers and Visitors sections, you get a good idea of what current and potential customers like about your brand.

Use LinkedIn’s demographics graphs to get a breakdown of who’s viewing your Company Page, and combine these insights from the results you receive on Google Analytics to help you analyze and improve on your LinkedIn strategies moving forward — in a way that positively drives your bottom line.

#2 Understanding Vanity Metrics

Using vanity metrics to measure the performance of content campaigns on social media is perhaps one of the simplest things to do in marketing, but also one of the most difficult. It’s simple because vanity metrics are easy to obtain in large numbers — all platforms supply them; it’s difficult because they are often ambiguous when it comes to reporting a return on investment (ROI) or value to a business. It’s this second point that is the thorn in the side of many marketers who are struggling to discover the true value of a vanity metric to a business.

In this section, “vanity metrics” include impressions, likes, shares, comments, followers, open rates, views, traffic, time on site, bounce rate, and many more. These are often referred to as “engagement metrics” or “consumption metrics,” — they simply are the most-used metrics in social media, content marketing, digital advertising, PR, and inbound campaigns to measure the performance and success of your marketing efforts.

As far as the numbers go, vanity metrics look great on paper. But the sheen on these numbers fades when you try to use them to explain important business outcomes like ROI or customer lifetime value (CLTV); they become hollow digits that contribute little substance to proving your marketing is making money.

A case in point, the number of “likes” earned from a Facebook post for example, rarely correlates to the number of products sold on a store shelf. Some would argue that there is no correlation at all. Indeed, it is possible to make more sales from a post with only one “like” than from a post with 10,000 “likes.” The number of engagements is usually irrelevant to the number of sales. There is no clear correlation or causation between the metric and the goal.

It’s the act of counting vanity metrics as evidence for success that is a problem — a problem easily demonstrated when measuring metrics such as impressions or traffic. Taking a deeper dive by following that traffic down the funnel to a conversion and the revenue earned by those conversions, you’ll find that some platforms over others, are considered more valuable channels for driving certain business goals. The vanity metric of traffic only tells half the story — which is unfortunately the most common number requested by management. There is no point in counting traffic unless it’s paired against a business objective. Yes, you need traffic to convert; but more traffic does not always equal more conversions.

Vanity metrics such as impressions, likes, and traffic are not useless; quite the contrary. The value of a vanity metric is in measuring non-transactional marketing goals (such as brand awareness, sentiment, and share of voice) as well as to optimize campaigns and troubleshoot marketing problems.

See how brands like Cetera used LinkedIn to create a marketing campaign that drove over $1 Million in new business by viewing their success story here.

Problems With Reporting Vanity Metrics

Let’s take a step back and look at why so many marketers use vanity metrics as indicators of business success. The simplest answer is that general metrics such as likes, followers and shares are easy to report on, not because they’re relevant to what you’re trying to achieve. Vanity metrics are typically free or easy to obtain compared with other valuable metrics such as ROI or CLTV, which require time, qualification, and testing to obtain.

Marketers take this easy route peppered with vanity metrics, not because they are lazy but because they are under pressure to show immediate success to superiors. Marketers use vanity metrics because they help show others in the organization that marketing provides immediate value. In other words, it’s quick and cheap reporting. But surely they can do better than this? It is important to remember that while the marketing spend will have an impact on the profit-and-loss statement immediately, dollars spent today are building the brand as an asset for the future. Marketing efforts not only drive sales and profits in the short term but also strengthen brand equity and customer relationships over time. You only see these long-term results through effective and relevant content, and evaluation of vanity metrics over time.

Optimization Metrics, Not Vanity Metrics

Like “clickbait,” the words “vanity metric” have earned undeserved negative connotations, making it easy for marketers to dismiss their value. I like the term “optimization metrics” because it helps you understand their value. The purpose of a vanity/optimization metric is to help optimize your content for your target audience on a specific channel.

When you report the number of impressions, clicks, or shares your content receives, you should not tie the numbers to ROI. Instead, you should tie them to better understanding your audience on that channel. Even the same vanity metrics (likes, comments, and shares) will have different meanings depending on the channel.

As a marketer, you can judge the vanity metric of comments on LinkedIn to be more valuable to your brand’s sentiment and marketing efforts than those received on YouTube for example. Alternatively, when it comes to the vanity metric of traffic, those who engage with content through Google Search are usually higher value (if your goal is transactional) than those on Instagram. With this in mind, leverage vanity metrics to support how to improve messaging to your target audiences through A/B testing and troubleshooting.

Relationship Between A/B Testing And Vanity Metrics

Again, vanity metrics are most useful to report on your marketing goals, not your business goals. As an example, let’s take the marketing goal of awareness. You want to know if your content is resonating and relevant to your target audience — are they aware of your brand and content? To uncover this, measure awareness through A/B testing and the resulting vanity metrics. Let’s say you post content to LinkedIn and want to test imagery to see which works better for your targeted LinkedIn audience. For example, you run an A/B test on snippet images to see if the image of the computer or the image of the woman is more relevant to your target audience.

To determine the outcome of this test you can monitor metrics such as click-through rate and impressions — where more clicks can equal a positive correlation, and more impressions could mean either a positive or negative correlation. Once you’ve analyzed the data and have come to a conclusion,you now adjust future content posts on LinkedIn to the optimized iconography.

A/B testing requires strategic planning across a large audience pool to deliver actionable insights. It takes time to do this right, so expect posts to fail in the beginning, as you are light on insights. But as your testing gets better so will your content and its performance.

What About The ROI?

Vanity metrics contribute to a return on investment, but how much they contribute to ROI fluctuates wildly; you need to align your expectations. At times, you can clearly see a direct line of sight from vanity metrics to an ROI goal; yet most of the time, the vanity metric is so high up the funnel that the results are too ambiguous to contribute effectively around bottom-of-the-funnel goals.

To illustrate this point, it is both difficult and fruitless to try to measure the impact a piece of engagement (such as a share on LinkedIn) had on creating a sale on your website. Firstly, as we’ve discussed, metrics such as the number of “likes” do not necessarily correlate to the number of sales. Secondly, time is important.

Let’s speculate about a customer who “shared” your LinkedIn post 18 months before they converted to a sale. A lot of time has passed between that engagement and the business goal, which makes it unlikely that the share on LinkedIn had anything substantial to do with the sale. Perhaps the share happened on a mobile phone whereas the sale occurred on desktop. Unless the customer is tracked across devices, her share on LinkedIn is invisible to the eventual outcome.

All these factors support the relatively ambiguous and pointless exercise of trying to tie vanity metrics to measure ROI without a good attribution model in place. Instead, when looking to measure ROI, focus on metrics that allow you to enhance the volume and quality of your conversions such as customer lifetime value (CLTV). This metric is not a vanity metric. Nor is it easy or fast to build. Vanity metrics illuminate movement along the customer journey, but CLTV ultimately is attributed to how well you track and understand your consumer journey.

To better understand your CLTV, you need to build attribution models and lead scoring, and set business goals and values against user actions. Again, this process is not easy, nor is it fast — if it were, none of us would be doing the foolhardy practice of using vanity metrics as the substitute. You will not know your CLTV for perhaps a couple of years. During that time, you should use your vanity metrics to A/B test and enhance your marketing around the audience with the goal to develop a better understanding around their journey and clarity on their CLTV. Better use of vanity metrics leads to a more accurate and actionable CLTV, resulting in better business returns.

“Instead of one way interruption, Web marketing is about delivering useful content at just the precise moment that a buyer needs it.” — David Meerman Scott ( Marketing and Sales Strategist) @dmscott

Overall, vanity metrics can be used to measure many things, but they are most valuable when used to test and improve how your target audience is reacting to your content on different channels. Use vanity metrics to best measure your marketing goals such as sentiment or brand awareness on a specific channel. For business goals, such as ROI, vanity metrics should take a back seat to those metrics that build the customer lifetime value narrative (conversions, subscriptions, MQLs, SQLs, etc.). But note, this is not a quick win. CLTV takes time, A/B testing, volumes of content, and conversions to build an accurate picture. Don’t look for the quick and dirty win with vanity metrics; it’s not there.

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While familiarizing yourself with the different types of metrics available on LinkedIn can be a painful process, gauging which of these metrics you should be reporting on in order to track your performance in relation to your business goals on the platform will require some trial and error. This will largely depend on what your business is trying to achieve on a site like LinkedIn, and what strategies it is using to get there.

As you will see in my next article, many brands have made mistakes when trying to report on their performance on LinkedIn, and I hope that enlightening you to these will help you avoid making them yourself. So read “How Can Your Brand Measure Success On LinkedIn?- Part 3 (The Advanced Guide)” now.

LinkedIn Resources

What Can I Do With LinkedIn? — Part 1 (The Beginner’s Guide)

What Can I Do With LinkedIn? — Part 2 (The Intermediate Guide)

What Can I Do With LinkedIn? — Part 3 (The Advanced Guide)

How Can Your Brand Measure Success On LinkedIn? — Part 1 (The Beginner’s Guide)

How Can Your Brand Measure Success On LinkedIn? — Part 2 (The Intermediate Guide)

How Can Your Brand Measure Success On LinkedIn? — Part 3 (The Advanced Guide)