Website Demographics: Introducing LinkedIn’s New Tool for Understanding Professional Audiences
Are you targeting the right type of content at the right type of people? What if you no longer had to make assumptions; and guess whether your marketing campaigns are working or not.
LinkedIn recently announced the launch of a new reporting tool. Its aim will be to let business owners see who arrives on their website; giving them the upper hand when targeting content for their marketing campaign. LinkedIn Website Demographics will be all about fine tuning marketing attempts; and directing visitors to content that actually interests a target audience.
Website Demographics argues that it will leverage data from its 500 members. However, it will provide insights without violating member privacy. According to LinkedIn officials, the interface will be available for businesses that also use LinkedIn Campaign Manager.
A Closer Look at the LinkedIn Website Demographics Tool
At a first glimpse, Website Demographics looks like the next big thing in professional audience targeting and monitoring for marketers. The soon-to-be-released tool will only work if users have the LinkedIn Insight Tag inserted within the page they plan to monitor.
Businesses will finally be able to see what types of professionals land on their websites. According to LinkedIn, Website Demographics uses professional demographical data that adheres to specific parameters to target your audience. Some of its potential benefits:
- It can be used to analyze any page on your website; or more pages at the same time
- You can compare two pages at once; put them side by side to see which performs better
- View changes over time; so that you can adjust, improve and adapt your message
Matching the right audience with the right content has never been easier. It looks like LinkedIn’s Website Demographics tool has potential. We can’t get our hands on it yet, and test its performance. This means that rumors about its alleged drawbacks are just getting started.
Website Demographics – another LinkedIn Insight Tag tool wrapped up nicely?
It looks like LinkedIn’s upcoming audience-targeting tool will be similar to the Insight Tag tracking mechanism; the tool was released by LinkedIn in April, this year. Its aim is to unlock insights about visitors accessing your websites through in-depth reporting. Although Website Demographics looks promising, there are some inconsistencies.
It looks like Website Demographics doesn’t measure unique visitors; but page views. No raw figures will be shown as the page views will be expressed in percentile share. In layman’s terms: a business won’t see how many people from a certain company landed on a certain page on its website; but a percentage that may say something like “50% of your page’s views come from Company X”. That’s about it.
Cross-referencing your audience with Website Demographics
Even with LinkedIn’s Website Demographics tool, cross-referencing your audience may not be that accurate. LinkedIn argues that businesses will be able to overlay their website’s audience by location and industry. Assuming that you want to check one of your website’s page; and see if that page is popular among beauty professionals in France.
Website Demographics can only tell you that your page ranks high among beauty professionals; and that it also ranks high in France. But that doesn’t necessarily mean your page ranks high for beauty professionals in France. In this case, cross-referencing your audience is debatable.
Takeaway
Does this mean you should stick to marketing automation products like Salesforce, HubSpot and Google Analytics, since we already know these three provide in-depth metrics? On the one side, LinkedIn’s Website Demographics is free; on the other side, it only works within the LinkedIn Campaign Manager, where the sponsored content you create is paid. We strongly believe LinkedIn still has some things to sort out before the big launch.
Featured Image by Rodion Kutsaev on Unsplash
Content Image by Michał Grosicki on Unsplash
