July 26, 2017
By Sam Del Rowe, contributing writer

LinkedIn Marketing Solutions Announces Website Demographics

LinkedIn Marketing Solutions today announced Website Demographics, which aims to help marketers discover the professional traits of their website visitors.

The solution aims to empower marketers in three key ways: understanding their audiences better, creating tailored content, and reaching their ideal prospects. It harnesses data from LinkedIn to provide marketers with information on job titles, company names, and industries, and it enables marketers to compare different pages to determine which kinds of content connect with different audiences. Marketers can then use what they learn about their website visitors to target those who are most likely to become qualified leads and customers.

“LinkedIn Marketing Solutions is really focused on building a most effective platform for marketers to engage with professionals. Leveraging the 500 million member base that we have on LinkedIn of professionals that are actively engaging and consuming professional content and developing their careers on LinkedIn—we want to make sure we offer marketers the opportunity to engage with them and ultimately convert them into customers for their respective businesses,” says Sudeep Cherian, director of global product marketing at LinkedIn Marketing Solutions, says. “We have a series of different products to allow them to do that. Underlying all of our end products is our platform which we call Campaign Manager, which is a free platform that any marketer can sign up for.” The Website Demographics tool is part of Campaign Manager.

Cherian notes that Website Demographics allows marketers to filter their website audiences by eight different dimensions: job title, industry, job seniority, job function, company, company size, location, and country. “You can really focus on making sure the right content is getting in front of the right audiences at scale…[and] you’re better assured that the work you are doing is going to resonate with the audiences that you’re focused on,” he says.

Yet all of this does not sacrifice the security of LinkedIn members. “Protecting the data and the overall experience for our members is a primary goal for LinkedIn,” Cherian says. “With Website Demographics, there’s no private personally identifiable information shared, and we’ve worked very hard with our legal and security teams to ensure we operate a secure experience. Specifically, the demographics that are visible through Website Demographics are only visible once a web page has achieved a certain threshold of traffic.”

In addition, the tool shows percentages of page views, not total unique visitors; it gives a general sense of audience type but doesn’t allow users to connect page views to a member’s identity. And businesses can only sort by one professional trait a time, not multiple ones. “All of these safeguards…balance the opportunity to offer the marketer insights into their audiences that are coming to their page while still protecting our members,” Cherian says.