Google Analytics for LinkedIn

Want to achieve better insights from your LinkedIn campaigns? By making effective use of UTM codes you can really maximise the data from your activities and get great insights from Google Analytics.

Maybe you’re new to LinkedIn, or maybe you have been advertising on it for a while… either way, you probably know that it is possible for you to track the engagement level of posts on the platform itself. However, for deeper insights you need a different tool: Google Analytics.

Through Google Analytics you can measure the effectiveness of your posts, and analyse which activity seems to be most successful in directing people to your website. It’s important for you to understand why your referrals have visited your site, as you’ll know what to invest more in in the future. You can do this by using UTM codes.

UTM codes are simple sets of text added to URLs in a specified format to tell Google Analytics more about the referring source. In order to capture all the data, you need to tag all your URLs manually using UTM codes. To set up UTM codes, you can use Google’s URL builder tool. LinkedIn will automatically convert your URL to a shortened format, but make sure that you use appropriate vocabulary, as users will be able to see it in the address bar.

Consistency is a big deal for data analysis purposes, as it means that you get clean and robust data. Google Analytics doesn’t treat upper and lower case as the same character, so ‘Paid Search’ and ‘paid search’ are treated as different strings. This is why you should develop a glossary of terms and naming conventions that make sense for your purpose. Bear in mind that if you have multiple people in multiple teams publishing content, this all needs to tie together. A glossary of terms will ensure that everyone throughout your organisation is conforming to the same protocols and formats.

UTM tags will appear in Google Analytics in the standard reports for the dimensions described with a UTM tag, but you also have the option of creating custom reports.

Read the full guide ‘Tracking your LinkedIn campaigns on Google Analytics’ here.

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Paul Reeve

Freelance Marketing Consultant

Paul is a freelance Marketing Consultant specialising in strategy, communication and analytics. He’s worked with Webcertain for more than 10 years. With more than 25 years in marketing roles, he was in the right place at the right time when the internet became mainstream, witnessing the evolution and development of the digital world first-hand. Paul has dedicated his working life to helping clients improve their website architecture and content to deliver their KPI targets. His real passion is in mentoring to enable those he coaches to realise their own potential, moulding their learnings into practical performance and positive, confident decision-making.

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