How to Find and Interpret Analytics of your LinkedIn Personal Profile Page(Updated August 2022)
So you’ve been dabbling into LinkedIn and seem to be getting some traction. Or at least you think you are.
But have you ever had a look at the analytics of your LinkedIn personal profile page?
Do you even know where they are? That’s okay if you don’t. Because in this post I’ll go over where to find analytics for your LinkedIn personal profile page, and how to interpret them.
Since writing this in 2020, things have changed a bit on LinkedIn. I’ve now amended this blog to show what stats you can get in t a free profile, as well as what the difference in the information you can get from your profile analytics between a free profile and LinkedIn Premium.
Where to find Analytics for your free LinkedIn Profile
So your LinkedIn personal profile page analytics are not as comprehensive as a company page, and they’re also not a comprehensive as if you have a premium account with LinkedIn. LinkedIn Premium goes for about 50 USD per month for the base plan.
Whether or not you want to use LinkedIn Premium, you can still get some basic stats off of your personal profile that you may be able to use to your advantage for your small business.
Everyone has a basic dashboard on their LinkedIn profile page, whether you are on mobile or you're on the desktop version. Simply go into your profile, and scroll to just under your Activity section.
Three basic stats show up on that dashboard page: who has viewed your profile, content performance, and the number of times your profile has appeared in search on LinkedIn.
With each one of these basic stats, you can find out a little bit more information that might help you analyse if your content is working and if you're getting your profile and your business in front of the right people. It's just a matter of breaking them down a little bit more and really going into the basic data. So let's go ahead and break down the stats and the data that you can find out on a basic profile page and why it's important and what you can use it for.
Linked Profile Page Stat 1 - Who has viewed your profile
Note for this data, you have to be in a public mode to be able to dive further into this data on your profile, or on a premium plan.
To check and change this setting, all you have to do is change your privacy settings so that you are in “public view mode”. It’s worth noting that this means that when you are looking at somebody else's profile, they will be able to see your name and basic information on their account if they have a look at their profile. If you want to keep this private, you're unfortunately not going to be able to get that much data off of this stat.
The stats for this particular piece of information go back to the past 90 days, so it gives you a decent amount of data to work with. What you can see with it is spikes that might correlate with your activity, or if you published a relatable piece of content that got people talking.
Why is who has viewed your LinkedIn profile important?
Looks at this data can show you if you’re in the good graces of the algorithm on LinkedIn because you've been a little bit more active for a certain period of time, or that particular post that you've put up has resonated with your audience. It’s natural for someone on LinkedIn to go view your profile if your post appeared in their feed (because of hashtags or someone else engaging with your post), or if they found your comment insightful.
From this area, you can also see the companies who have viewed your profile. If you have a premium account, you can view who has viewed your profile and filter based on company, industries and locations. You used to be able to see who has seen you via the LinkedIn homepage as well, meaning who has seen one of their connections like your content, and then went and checked out your profile. Real shame LinkedIn took this information away from its members.
With this information, you can see if you are getting eyes onto your business and your profile from the right type of companies, the companies that you would want to align your business with and possibly get on as a client or a customer.
LinkedIn Stat 2 - content performance
The next statistic is content performance. This area shows the impressions and engagement count of your posts overall.
What this stat used to show was your reach.
Impressions are when your post is put onto someone's feed, it doesn't necessarily mean that they viewed it. But if someone has visually seen it, so they have gone through their feed and they have stopped and looked at it, that is reach.
Can you see how much more powerful an actual “reach” number could be?
From here you can calculate your overall engagement rate (#of engagements/# of impressions = engagement rate). If you’re sitting at around 2%, that’s pretty decent. That’s usually the industry average.
Within this section, there is zero difference between what stats are shown here for a free profile, or a premium account.
Post views are also different from article analytics. Yes, there is a difference between posts and articles. And if you're not sure what the difference is, go ahead and check out my video on what the difference between an article and a post on LinkedIn is.
For article analytics, once you’ve clicked into the post view statistics, you can then filter by articles. You can then view data within your article itself, and in-depth data is available for two years. It's the longest amount of time or the longest set of data that you have within a free LinkedIn profile page or premium account. Article views are measured by someone that is clicking and viewing the article. It is also counting it when you view the article. So you need to bear that in mind, that your data will be a little bit skewed.
LinkedIn no longer tells you your video view count. Maybe that’s simply because they don’t want LinkedIn to be flooded with crap video content because of the neverending quest for vanity metrics…who knows. Within each post, on a LinkedIn account they pretty up the exact same stats as a free account - impressions, engagements and viewer demographics (job titles, industries and location). You can easily find all this information just by looking at individual profiles.
This is the most disappointing of LinkedIn stats. We know LinkedIn has so much more information on your content’s performance, yet for some reason they’re not willing to share it.
How to interpret LinkedIn post view data
So why are post views important? They give you an insight into the active roles of the people that are looking into your posts. This could be people that you follow or that you are connected with, as well as people that have seen that post or seen the activity of someone that they are connected with and they start getting curious about who you are.
If you don't see particular companies or job titles for the type of customer that you want to be going after, you might need to rethink about the content that you're creating and maybe pivot in a different direction. A direction that is highly relatable to the exact roles and industries you want to target.
You might also need to rethink the hashtags you’re using. Remember that it's not just people who follow you that are going to see that content. If you are using the right hashtags on your content when you're putting up those posts, people that are following those hashtags or people that are seeking out information about the subject of that hashtag will be seeing your post as well. If you’re unsure how to do hashtag research on LinkedIn, check out my video on how to do this.
So again, if you're not getting that right potential customer who is looking at your posts, then maybe it's time to rethink that content, or start brainstorming a little bit more on how to hone in into that potential audience on LinkedIn.
LinkedIn profile stat 3 - number of times you have appeared in LinkedIn search
The last stat that you can see on your LinkedIn personal profile page is the number of times that you have appeared in LinkedIn search. This is probably the most important stat that you can see on your free LinkedIn profile page.
These stats are for the last seven days and shows you where the searchers work and what their job roles are, as well as the keywords that they used where you appeared in the search results.
A little thing about keywords in LinkedIn search
“Keywords in LinkedIn search are based on your profile, not your posts”
So a little thing about keywords.
Keywords in LinkedIn search are based on your profile, not necessarily your posts. LinkedIn Search is also not 100% accurate. The longer your search term, the less likely you’re going to get results for that exact term.
What’s worse is LinkedIn has completely removed the best part of their profile stats, and that was which keywords you appeared in LinkedIn Search. Before on a free profile, you could get the first or the second keyword in a free profile, but in a premium profile, you could get the full list of keywords of where your profile appeared in Search.
I think you have every LinkedIn member who keyword stuffed the hell out of their profile to thank for that. LinkedIn seems to have removed any stats that while they were extremely helpful, could easily be taken advantage of by spammers and people only interested in vanity.
Irrespective of why LinkedIn took this amazing stat away, you need to make sure that your profile is up-to-date with he right keywords you want to be found for.
Make sure that you have your business on there and as one of the top areas in your experience section in your profile and summary.
Make sure your headline is up to date with your current role as well, plus has some of the keywords that you want to be sought after and that you want to appear in search results for.
Your headline is essentially the most viewed bit of text, besides your name when it comes to your LinkedIn profile because that shows up on any time that you comment, any time that you like something on LinkedIn. So you need to make sure that your headline is really up to scratch.
If you put in a headline that says, "Guru," or "Buddha," that's not necessarily the way people will be searching for the type of professional that you are when it comes to LinkedIn searches. They will be looking for maybe, "Specialist "or industry leader in XYZ," that sort of thing. While it can be catchy, make sure that your LinkedIn Profile headline still has the right keywords in there that you need for your business and your profile to be viewed in search.
How to interpret LinkedIn search data
The number of times you appeared in LinkedIn search shows you if you're hitting that target audience based on the information you’ve put in your profile.
You can see the companies and job functions of the people who find you on search and then really see if they are the type of person that you want to be aligning with. Are they the type of customer that you want to gain within your company's repertoire?
If you see that there is a theme in the terms of job roles that are looking at your profile, that's when you can go and say, "Is my content aligning with these types of roles "or is this a new target audience that I should be looking at as well?"
If they have nothing to do with your industry and the product and service that you're providing, maybe the content in your profile needs updating to get the right eyes on your business.
Remember, your profile also shows who you have worked for and who you currently are working for. So make sure job details are up to date because otherwise, you could be appearing in wrong search results. If you want a few more tips on how to optimise your LinkedIn profile, check out this article on 5 easy ways to optimise your LinkedIn profile.
While a company page has a lot more analytics to it and a premium paid profile page goes even deeper than a free profile page, these basic analytics that are on your free LinkedIn account can still give you enough insight to let you know if you were on the right track with your content, or if you need to pivot a little more to get in front of the right type of target audience that you want to align your business with.
Like what you’ve read and looking to level up your LinkedIn profile? Why not grab my free list of LinkedIn post ideas? Sign up to my newsletter and I’ll flick through a copy.