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There’s an adage often quoted by marketing professionals: You can’t improve what you can’t measure.
Whether you’re trying to foster a more engaged workforce, improve your recruiting efforts, or build a strong brand reputation, you’ll need to track your LinkedIn key performance indicators (KPIs) to demonstrate progress.
Tracking the right LinkedIn KPIs is the only way to understand whether you’re moving the needle toward your overarching goal—or if a change in strategy is needed. LinkedIn has a robust set of native tools that can dial down to details about your page, visitors, content, followers, and even your Talent Brand analytics.
All this data can sometimes be overwhelming, however. Here’s how to separate the real insight from the rest of the noise, with the top LinkedIn KPIs you should be tracking in 2023.
Which LinkedIn KPIs should you track?
Before we dive into the top LinkedIn KPIs of 2023, it’s important to make sure the metrics you choose to track are aligned with your overall goals.
The first step in assessing the efficacy of your LinkedIn marketing strategy is to define your goals. Some companies use LinkedIn as a B2B sales channel. Others use LinkedIn solely for recruitment purposes. Those in the former group are more likely to be interested in metrics such as LinkedIn’s SSI score; those in the latter would pay attention to traffic quality or follower count.
The LinkedIn KPIs you track could also change as your company grows. Startups are more likely to be interested in growing awareness of their brand, whereas a mature enterprise will want to know how their employees are positioned as thought leaders.
Hopefully, many of the LinkedIn KPIs we’ve outlined below work for most brands that are using LinkedIn as part of their content marketing or sales strategy. Not all will be relevant to your business, so return to your overarching goal to make sure the KPIs you track are working for your company.
The top LinkedIn KPIs for 2023
We’ve broken the top LinkedIn KPIs into different categories to help you find metrics to watch for your LinkedIn campaign or page.
LinkedIn KPIs for brand awareness
Brand awareness is a crucial metric for startups and essentially boils down to this: how many people recognize your company name and believe you’re a real business?
These top-of-funnel metrics are vital to building trust and moving sales leads, potential candidates, and consumers along the customer journey. Some of the KPIs you will want to track to see if your brand awareness is increasing include:
- Reach – how many unique users have seen your content?
- Video views – how many times have people watched your video?
- Page views – how many times have people visited your LinkedIn page?
- Engagement rate – how many people like, share, or comment on your post?
- Follower growth rate – how many new followers are you recruiting over a certain time period?
Follower growth rate is more important to track than total followers, as this metric can demonstrate whether your marketing campaigns are positively impacting your page. A high follower growth rate can indicate that your content is resonating with your target audience and that you’re building a strong online presence.
Once you’re tracking your KPIs, you want to see them improve! To save time and maximize your exposure on LinkedIn, consider using a tool like Clearview Social that helps you generate content with AI and automatically post at peak times when your audience is active.
LinkedIn KPIs for sales
LinkedIn is a powerful tool for sales professionals. LinkedIn’s Sales Navigator is designed to give sales professionals access to specific features that help them connect with potential customers. It’s packed with analytics and reporting capabilities that can help you track sales-specific KPIs, including:
- Social Selling Index (SSI) – how effective are your outreach efforts?
- Leads – who is a potential candidate for your sales pitch?
- Cost per lead – how much does it cost to generate each new lead?
- Follower demographics – who makes up your audience, and what do they care about?
- Visitors – who is visiting your page, but not following you?
LinkedIn’s audience insights can show you more than just demographics. Use this tool to learn about your audience’s job titles, industries, interests, and skills. This will help you craft more specific sales messaging that resonates with potential leads.
Read more: How to Use the LinkedIn SSI Score to Maximize Sales
LinkedIn KPIs for marketing
If you run a sponsored campaign on LinkedIn, you’ll want to see if it worked — again, you can’t improve what you can’t measure!
LinkedIn provides a range of KPIs for any sponsored content you purchase on the platform. These include:
- Impressions – how many people saw your sponsored content?
- Clicks and CTR – was your content or messaging effective at driving users to your site?
- Cost per click (CPC) – how much did this campaign cost per click?
- Cost per conversion – what was the percentage of users who complete a desired action?
Our guide, Social Media KPIs: 12 Key Figures You Should Be Tracking, offers more ideas for the key metrics you should track in any social media marketing effort.
Learn more about LinkedIn marketing: Watch A Decade of LinkedIn Tips in 30 Minutes and read our guide: How to Use LinkedIn to Grow Your B2B Business.
LinkedIn KPIs for recruitment
Of course, LinkedIn is best known as a platform for hiring. As you design a recruitment strategy for LinkedIn, make sure you track these KPIs:
- Time to hire – how long does it take from start to finish to bring on a new employee?
- Qualified candidates per opening – are your job ads attracting the right profiles?
- Quality of hiring resource – how does LinkedIn compare to other job boards and your company careers page?
- Offer acceptance rate – how many employees go through the process and say yes to your brand?
LinkedIn offers tons of other resources to recruiters. For instance, LinkedIn Talent Insights provides up-to-date industry trends and identifies potential candidates in high-demand fields.
Read more: How To Use LinkedIn For Recruitment
LinkedIn KPIs for employee advocacy
A formal employee advocacy program is one of the most effective ways to use LinkedIn. Employee advocacy encourages employees to share thought leadership from your company to increase your brand’s visibility. This type of content has a cascading effect — recruiting more followers, building trust with your company, and enticing passive candidates to become active ones.
When you implement a formal employee advocacy program, it can take some tinkering to understand which content resonates with your employees’ networks. Some of the KPIs you’ll want to track during these campaigns include:
- Click through rate – how many people click on a link in your post?
- Engagement rate – how many people like, share, or comment on your post?
- Reach – how many unique users have seen your content?
- Employee shares – how many members of your team shared your company content?
- Earned media value (EMV) – the amount a share would be worth if purchased through traditional digital advertising methods
This last metric, EMV, offers a way to assess whether the resources you’re allocating correlate to the increased metrics you’re after (sales, applications, views, etc.). Any marketing spend for your business needs to have a clear set of objectives and performance metrics, giving you the tools you need to determine ROI.
Learn more with this guide: How to Train Your Employees to Use LinkedIn for Business
How to track these LinkedIn KPIs
LinkedIn offers tools that can help you get a snapshot of your data within the platform. LinkedIn Analytics can show you a rundown of what’s been going on on your company page as well as any paid marketing campaigns you host.
If you want more detailed, actionable information, consider working with a tool like Clearview Social. Clearview Social’s social media analytics provide a comprehensive overview of your employee advocacy efforts, linking your content generation and strategy to earned media value (EMV). EMV is a great indicator to measure the ROI on your social media strategy and see how employees getting involved in shares can dramatically amplify your results.
Learn more about how Clearview Social can help you test, iterate, and improve your LinkedIn content by booking a free demo today.