How to Use LinkedIn Website Demographics as a Marketing Tool

While account-based marketing (ABM) integrations rely on IP information and third-party data to understand who visitors are, LinkedIn is more accurate in identifying users because it relies on its own user data. This means LinkedIn can provide more information at a higher accuracy rate than most ABM systems can.

The best thing about the Website Demographics tool is that it’s free. You need to have a LinkedIn ads account but you don’t have to actually run any ads to gain access to the insights.

With this tool, you can get insights for your website as a whole or specific pages (which is helpful if you have multiple products and various types of consumers). Here’s how to get started.

#1: Install the LinkedIn Insight Tag

To get data from LinkedIn Website Demographics, you need to install the insight tag on your site. To do this, open your LinkedIn ads account and select Insight Tag from the Account Assets drop-down menu.

After you’ve added the insights tag to your site, it will start collecting data about your website visitors. Once enough data is collected, it will start providing you with insights.

Pro Tip: Most people use the insight tag on their main website but you can place the tag on any web property you own—other sites you own, your subdomains, and so forth. Just make sure you segment the properties so you can view them individually.

#2: View Your LinkedIn Website Demographics Data

While LinkedIn won’t disclose personal information in compliance with privacy policies, Website Demographics provides information about your website visitors’ job functions and titles, industry information, company names and sizes, and more.

The data LinkedIn provides closely matches the targeting options available in Campaign Manager so you can use these insights to build your LinkedIn campaigns.

To view this data, click the Website Demographics tab in the toolbar at the top of Campaign Manager.

Before diving into the data, keep these points in mind:

• The data provided is based on web visits so it includes visits that are paid and visits you get from PR, social posts, and other sources.
• While you can use the insights for both B2B and B2C, the data relies on users having a LinkedIn account. You won’t see data for visitors who LinkedIn can’t match to its database.
• The data doesn’t currently take into account actions taken on your site such as signups or purchases; only visits to a page.

So before you review the data for specific dates, first try to understand what traffic sources are sending traffic to your site or specific pages to ensure the data is as clean and organic as possible.

A common mistake is running a LinkedIn campaign targeting a specific audience like CEOs of shipping companies, and then being surprised when you view the web demographics. Of course you will see CEOs as the top visitors and shipping as the top industry, leading you to invest more in targeting CEOs of shipping companies.

To illustrate, if a majority of your audience is of low seniority, you may want to focus on providing an industry overview with your product solution. A higher seniority audience would not need as much education.

You can use the company size data to gain a better understanding of what kind of customers are visiting your site.

If you’re attracting small companies but selling an enterprise product, for instance, you could reduce your paid spend with better targeting or improve your messaging to attract enterprise and deter smaller companies. One way to do this might be to add pricing to your messaging (“pricing starts at $X”).

#3: Apply Website Visitor Data to Improve Your LinkedIn Marketing

Now that you have all of these amazing insights into your website visitors, here are some ways you can use this information for your business and marketing efforts.

Tailor your blog content to your audience’s needs and preferences. Make readers feel like the content was made for them.

Use these insights to build your customer personas. Then find placements on other sites to target these audiences. For example, if your visitors’ top job title is engineer and top industry is high-tech, you might look for tech blogs focused on engineering.

Identify shared customer traits. Compare your thank-you pages’ data with the corresponding product pages and look for correlations of demographics from visitors who convert. These are the ones you want to improve on and find more traffic sources for.

At the same time, flag the demographics that don’t match up. These might be ones you want to work on narrowing traffic from.

Optimize your LinkedIn ad campaign targeting.Using the industry and job function/title data, research those positions to gain an understanding of what that audience may be interested in. Then use that information to improve your ad copy and messaging to better appeal to those personas.

Naturally, you can use the data to build your LinkedIn advertising campaigns. You’ll find it very easy to translate the insights into LinkedIn campaigns. As previously mentioned, the insight data correlates well with the LinkedIn targeting options.

There are, however, some targeting options still missing from the data such as member skills and interests. While you should use these insights to build some of your LinkedIn campaigns, don’t let it blind you to the other options. One of my favorites is targeting by member groups.

Conclusion

For companies looking for a simple solution to get meaningful insights about their customers and prospects, LinkedIn Website Demographics is a great place to start.

This high-impact tool can give you deep insights into your website traffic that doesn’t convert, as well as the traffic that does. With a very easy implementation process and at no direct financial cost, LinkedIn Website Demographics is a true gem.

Like every data point, it’s not what you know but how you use it. To get the most out of this tool, you’ll need to invest time in understanding the data, correlating it, and finding the best ways to use it for your business. Adding Website Demographics to your marketing tool stack can provide a missing piece of the puzzle.