In July, LinkedIn announced Website Demographics, a new tool to help B2B marketers learn more about their website visitors and the content they consume. The audience? LinkedIn’s 500-million-and-counting members – typically an engaged and qualified professional audience. When the tool was made available in September to companies with a LinkedIn Campaign Manager account, Collective Measures jumped at the chance to give it a try.
Free LinkedIn Website Demographic Tool, Easy Implementation
Website Demographics is free – you don’t have to advertise on LinkedIn to use the tool – and requires the placement of just a single tag (we used Google Tag Manager to place it) to deliver visitor data. You can easily access the data you collect via your LinkedIn Campaign Manager interface.
Customize your B2B audiences for best results
LinkedIn writes that Website Demographics will “help you understand your audience better,” “create tailored content,” and more easily “reach your ideal prospects.” Marketers are provided the opportunity to create custom audiences based on existing knowledge of website visitors. Then you wait, watch, and see how each audience interacts with your website content. From there, you can further tailor your approach with targeted ads and content designed to appeal to different professional needs.
Website Demographics provides eight different views of visitor traffic:
- Job function
- Job title
- Job seniority
- Company industry
- Company country
- Company location
- Company size
- Company name
LinkedIn cautions that “demographic metrics are approximate” to protect the privacy of the LinkedIn members who visit your website, but the tool still provides some really interesting and valuable insights. It’s possible to track visits to your entire website, just to your blog, or to another specific content group. You can also see how visitors from different industries consume content, and if there are patterns in content consumption you didn’t expect.
Publish, Review Results, then Revise as Necessary
The granularity in Job Title and Job Function can provide interesting insight. For example, if your primary goal is to engage Director Level contacts with thought leadership content, but you see that the majority of your engagement is from Entry Level individuals consuming practical, How To-type content, you may need to adjust your content strategy.
WHAT MARKETERS NEED TO KNOW About LinkedIn’s New Audience Tool
While retargeting visitors who visit specific pages is an easy task accomplished with filters, it does not appear that you can filter traffic from your own employees. Also, depending on how the LinkedIn member has constructed their Profile, they may appear in multiple categories – e.g., Owner and CEO. Still, these are picky points about an otherwise useful tool and, as stated earlier, LinkedIn does stress that all metrics are approximate.
This short video from LinkedIn on YouTube does a nice job describing how the tool works and what you can learn. Collective Measures will continue to experiment with Website Demographics, and to look for ways that clients can benefit from the quality information it provides to B2B marketers.
