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 modelled data source you can use for your custom LinkedIn Pages metrics.

This article contains the following sections:

• Finding your post metrics in LinkedIn Pages
• Connecting PowerMetrics to your LinkedIn Pages account
• Creating your query and modelled data source
• Creating your metric

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

To connect PowerMetrics to your LinkedIn Pages account:

1. In the left navigation sidebar, click your Account Name > Data Sources.
2. Click the Create a New Data Source button.
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.

5. Enter your LinkedIn login credentials and click Sign in. Then, click Allow to enable PowerMetrics to securely access your LinkedIn Pages data. Click Next.
6. 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.

7. 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 modelled data source. 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 modelled data source.

Creating your query and modelled data source

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 modelled data source.

To create your query and modelled data source:

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 modelled data source, 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 source. (See below.)

4. To define a date range for the data being retrieved, we’ll apply a filter to the TimeRangeStart and TimeRangeEnd columns.

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.)

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.

5. 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.

6. Click Save and continue.
7. On the Modify Data page, you can rename the modelled data source. 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 modelled data source later when you want to use it for your custom metrics.

8. Click Save and exit to save your modelled data source.

The details page for the modelled data source 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 modelled data source to build custom metrics for any (or all) of the other columns you chose when you created the data source, including: CommentMentions, Comments, Engagement, Impressions, Likes, ShareMentions, Shares, UniqueImpressions, and Count of CompanyId.

To create your metric:

1. On the details page for the modelled data source, click Create metrics.

The Create a custom metric page displays. This is where you'll choose the settings for your metric.

Note: If you closed the modelled data source, you can reopen it by selecting it from your list of data sources (accessed by clicking your Account name > Data Sources in the left navigation sidebar).

2. In the Metric value step, choose Clicks. This is the column in the modelled data source that contains the values you want to track in your metric. Make sure the default aggregation is set to Sum. Click Next. (See below.)

Note: In this example, we’re measuring “Clicks”, but, as mentioned above, you can come back to this modelled data source later to measure any of the other engagement metrics (columns) you chose when you created the data source, including: CommentMentions, Comments, Engagement, Impressions, Likes, ShareMentions, Shares, UniqueImpressions, and Count of CompanyId.

3. In the Segmentation step, select the CompanyId column. Click Next. (See below.)

4. In the Date & time step, choose the TimeRangeStart column from your modelled data source. Click Next. (See below.)

5. In the Data shape step, select Periodic Summary > Day. Click Next. (See below.)

6. In the Display settings step:

• Under Metric Name, enter LinkedIn Pages Post Clicks.
• Under Format, make sure the data format is Numeric.
• Under Favourable trend, select Trending up is positive.

7. Click Save.

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 modelled data source gets refreshed, new data is added to your metric, enabling you to see trends and compare your data to previous periods.