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Example: Tracking LinkedIn Pages post performance with data feed metrics

Updated

Keeping track of engagement on your LinkedIn Pages posts is crucial to understanding what your follower base responds to best. When you integrate LinkedIn Pages with PowerMetrics, you get access to an even more robust and informative set of analytics to visualize and track your engagement data as it evolves over time.

In this example, we’ll show you how to connect PowerMetrics to your LinkedIn Pages account. You’ll then learn how to use the query builder in PowerMetrics to retrieve post performance data (for example, clicks, comments, impressions, likes, and shares) and create a data feed you can use for your custom LinkedIn Pages metrics.

This article contains the following sections:

Finding your post metrics in LinkedIn Pages

In LinkedIn Pages, you'll find your post performance data in the Content analytics section of the LinkedIn Pages Admin Page. You can refer to this information to verify your data as it displays in PowerMetrics. See below for an example of data for the engagement metrics that we’ll be tracking in this article:

Now that you know what data we’ll be tracking, let’s connect PowerMetrics to your LinkedIn Pages account.

Connecting PowerMetrics to your LinkedIn Pages account

When you connect to your source data and bring it into PowerMetrics, you create a data feed. Data feeds combine your account connection (the service account you’re logged into that has the data for your metrics) and your data (as a visual component you can view and edit). Learn more about data feeds.

To connect PowerMetrics to your LinkedIn Pages account:

  1. In the left navigation sidebar, click the + button beside Data Feeds.
  2. Click Select data.
  3. On the Where is your data? page, select LinkedIn Pages.
  4. If this is your first time connecting to LinkedIn Pages:
    • Click Add new account.
    • Enter your LinkedIn Pages login credentials and click Sign in. Then, click Allow to enable PowerMetrics to securely access your LinkedIn Pages data. Click Next.
    • Next, to further define the data you're looking for, under Select account settings, click Add account settings and, on the Choose account settings page, select your LinkedIn Page from the drop-down list. Click Use account.
  5. If you’ve connected to LinkedIn Pages before, we assume you want to use the same account and take you directly to the next step - Creating your query and finalizing your data feed. If you want to connect to a different account, you can do so in the query builder by clicking the account connection at the top of the data preview window (see below). You can either select an alternate, existing account or click “Add new account”.

That's all there is to it! You're connected and ready to move on to creating a query and finalizing your data feed.

Creating your query and finalizing your data feed

After connecting your account, the query builder opens. You'll start by choosing a data view. Using that data view, we'll run a query to get a list of available columns from within it. You'll then choose from those columns (and add filters) to specify the data to include in your data feed.

To create your query and finalize your data feed:

  1. Under Data view, click the drop-down and select CompanyUpdateStatistics.
    The CompanyUpdateStatistics view contains the data for the LinkedIn Pages engagement metrics you’re going to track. Its contents should mirror what you see in the Content analytics section of the LinkedIn Pages Admin Page.
  2. To track your metrics by day, you’ll apply a filter at the data view level. Applying the filter here will impact all of the data being retrieved.
    • Click the Add filters (optional) button under Data view filters. (See below.)
    • Select the checkbox beside TimeGranularity, then click Apply.
    • Click the Click to add filter box, select Equals as the operator and enter DAY as the value. Click the Filter button. Click anywhere outside the filter dialog to close it and save the filter. (See below.)
  3. Under Columns, select the following: Clicks, CommentMentions, Comments, CompanyId, Engagement, Impressions, Likes, ShareMentions, Shares, and UniqueImpressions. These columns will be added to your data feed, which you’ll use later to create custom metrics. We’ll also select TimeRangeStart and TimeRangeEnd, so we can define the range of data we want to retrieve for our data feed. (See below.)
  4. To define a date range for the data being retrieved, we’ll apply a filter to the TimeRangeStart and TimeRangeEnd columns.
  5. First, we’ll apply a filter to the TimeRangeStart column.
    • Click the filter icon for the TimeRangeStart column. (See below.)
    • Click the Click to add filter box, select On or after as the operator and 7 days ago as the value. Click the Filter button.  Click anywhere outside the filter dialog to close it and save the filter. (See below.)
  6. Next, we’ll apply a filter to the TimeRangeEnd column.
    • Click the filter icon for the TimeRangeEnd column.
    • Click the Click to add filter box, select On or before as the operator and Today as the value. (See below for the end result.)

      Go here if you want to learn more about filtering in the query builder.
  7. Click Preview data.
    Note: Once you have a data preview table, you can optionally apply filters to column headers there (instead of in the left sidebar). Some people prefer that method as they can more easily see their data.
  8. Click Save query.
    The data feed editor displays.
  9. In the data feed editor, you can rename the data feed. By default, it’s automatically named to match the query. In our example, that's "LinkedIn CompanyUpdateStatistics".
    This step is optional but it might help you find the data feed later when you want to use it for your custom metrics.
  10. Click Save data feed.
    Your new, saved data feed displays. You're ready to use it to create a custom metric.

Creating your metric

The following example describes creating a LinkedIn Pages Post Clicks metric but you can use the same feed to build custom metrics for any (or all) of the other columns you chose when you created the data feed, including: CommentMentions, Comments, Engagement, Impressions, Likes, ShareMentions, Shares, UniqueImpressions, and Count of CompanyId.

To create your metric:

  1. In the data feed you just saved, click +Add metric. (See below.)

    Note: If you accidentally closed the data feed, you can reopen it from your list of data feeds (accessed by clicking Data Feeds in the left navigation sidebar.)
  2. Under Measure, select Clicks. This is the column from your data feed that contains the values you want to track in your metric.
    Note: In this example, we’re measuring “Clicks”, but, as mentioned above, you can come back to this data feed later to measure any of the other engagement metrics (columns) you chose when you created the feed, including: CommentMentions, Comments, Engagement, Impressions, Likes, ShareMentions, Shares, UniqueImpressions, and Count of CompanyId.
  3. Under Date and Time, enable the Data feed contains historical data toggle and select TimeRangeStart. This is the column from your data feed that contains the date/time associated with each value.
  4. Click the Settings tab.
  5. Under Date handling, select Use most recent values only > for each day. Your choice determines the data points your metric will use when calculating the metric value for a time period.
  6. Under Format, select Numeric.
  7. Under Aggregation, select Sum.
  8. Under Favourable trend, select Trending up is positive.
  9. Click the About tab.
  10. Under Name, enter LinkedIn Pages Post Clicks.
  11. Click Save metric.
    Your LinkedIn Pages Post Clicks custom metric is added to your list of metrics (accessed by clicking Metrics in the left navigation sidebar). As its data feed gets refreshed, new data is added to your metric, enabling you to see trends and compare your data to previous periods.

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