In the coming weeks, LinkedIn will be introducing a new program called Website Demographics.
This new tool allows B2B marketers to see what kinds of audiences they’re attracting with their marketing efforts. And things are sure to be interesting, armed with data from over 500+ million users, enhanced insights on professional audiences visiting your site will sure to be hit among professional marketers.
The new Website Demographics tool allows businesses to break down their website visitors across eight categories: Job Title, Industry, Job Sonority, Job Function, Company, Company Size, Location, and Country. This is the data we all provide as LinkedIn users.
Website Demographics can also be filtered by date range, to better understand campaign specific effectiveness in reaching and resonating with key targeted audience segments.
LinkedIn’s Introductory video for their new Website Demographics tool
The new LinkedIn Website Demographics tool will be free to anyone who completes their installation process of installing a LinkedIn tag on their website and lists the targeted pages they want to track (you can add your website site map, or just start with a simple landing page that’s part of a broader marketing campaign).
One of the best things about this upcoming tool from linkedin is that users can track any page they want on their website, and even compare page performance side by side (can you say hello QA testing for b2b landing pages!).
The comprehensive information available from this new tool will enable marketers to determine if a new ad campaign was successful, or if they want to know the types of people that are visiting their site daily.
Armed with new analytics, ad professionals can begin to get more granular on how they are specifically targeting their audiences.
Users will be able to further narrow the information down by date range, the past 30 days, the past seven days, this month, the previous month, today, yesterday, all time, or custom.
For LinkedIn protecting user data privacy is a priority, which puts various limitations on how much insight they can provide. That was highlighted in LinkedIn’s blog post saying “insight[s] into your company’s website visitors” is done is a way that prioritizes “member privacy”.
The known limitations we were able to locate so far are:
- LinkedIn can’t provide data for any page or group of pages until they’ve had at least 300 LinkedIn-linked visitors, potentially limiting data that’s available.
- Website Demographics also measures page views, as opposed to unique visitors. The distinction here is significant – if one person is coming back to your site repeatedly, that could skew your data, while LinkedIn can only display these visits as a percentage, not in raw detail.
- The system is reliant on the LinkedIn Insight tag, Website Demographics can only track desktop usage data. That’s particularly relevant when you consider the rising amount of mobile but still, any additional data is better than nothing, and despite the various limitations, there’s still a lot of potentials there.
What we found interesting was how LinkedIn is finding new ways to utilize their vast professional data set, in a way that feels refreshingly sophisticated (for what can be expected to come in the future) and accommodating to marketers who actively use the platform.
This undoubtedly comes on the heels of the Microsoft acquisition last June and shows how the company is working towards new solutions that seek to capitalize on the platforms vast, insight-rich dataset.
Bottom line, the key takeaway here is the new Website Demographics tools from LinkedIn are about getting in front of the right people and optimizing spends over time to ensure professional b2b marketing campaigns are reaching their key audience segments.
