Measuring LinkedIn with Google Analytics

Does your company leverage its LinkedIn profile? Are you using LinkedIn discussion groups? Can job seekers find their next great role on your LinkedIn page? All great questions. And if you answer yes to these (I hope you do) are you also measuring the value LinkedIn can provide for your SEO and possibly your lead-gen efforts?

Here are a couple ways you can geek out with LinkedIn, Google Analytics, and regular expressions to help paint your LinkedIn ROI picture.

Google Analytics is already good at showing you total traffic hitting your site via LinkedIn. These examples drill in a bit to help you see WHERE on LinkedIn folks are finding you. Please let me know how you use and adapt them!

I’ll show you how you set-up widgets for your Company Profile and Discussion Group. You can use these same principles to measure clicks to your job postings.

(NOTE: Job postings need to be on a web page you track with Google Analytics. If instead you use a 3rd party recruiting tool, you might not be able to measure job posting related SEO.)

LinkedIn Company Profile

So, here’s what I see in Google Analytics:

It’s important to be aware of the URLs by which your company profile is accessed. Your profile is available via a company ID in the URL and by the more reader-friendly vanity URL. In my company’s case, those URLs are

http://ift.tt/1da9yyO

&

http://ift.tt/1j3jxK7

The former can be found by hovering your mouse over your company name in your update feed:

With that, here’s the setup for the Google Analytics widget shown above:

And here’s the Regular Expression string:

(\W|^)(/company/rocket-software|/company/10127)(\W|$)

Please leave the trailing slash off the end of URL strings within your RegEx (using this example). You’ll block referrers that don’t include that slash.

LinkedIn Groups and Careers

Repeat the steps above to create additional widgets for your LinkedIn Groups and Careers.

Edit your RegEx strings as necessary… but here are hints using my examples using “contains” rather than Regular Expression:

Careers:

/jobs2/view/externalApply

Groups:

/groups/Rocket-Software-3997577

Google Analytics Dashboards

Here’s a link to a dashboard template you can import into your Google Analytics account. It’s a modified version from Erik Wagner. You’ll need to change config settings as necessary.

Happy tracking!

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