One of the more annoying elements of LinkedIn’s performance reporting is the lack of context that it provides for its data points.
For some reason, ever since the platform was acquired by Microsoft back in 2016, LinkedIn has opted to only provide part of the story for all of its reported metrics.
For example:
- LinkedIn reports “record engagement” in every single one of its quarterly updates (included within Microsoft’s reports), but it provides no context as to what that actually means.
- LinkedIn gives you notifications of how many views your posts generated within a certain time period, but it provides no data on how that compares to other users.
- LinkedIn reports total members, which has now exceeded a billion, but that’s almost meaningless, as it doesn’t reflect active users.
The last point is probably the most relevant, because marketers want to know how many people are actually using the app. How active they are is also relevant (the first point), but at the least, knowing how many people are actively logging in and engaging in the LinkedIn feed every day would be valuable context.
LinkedIn used to report this, in the days before Microsoft took over. But now, it’s a small part of the bigger MSFT machine, which means it doesn’t need to provide granular data.
So we have to refer to estimates to work this out, and probably the best indicator we have is LinkedIn’s EU active user data, which it has to report every six months as part of its obligations under the Digital Services Act (DSA).
And it provided its latest update on this last week.
As you can see in this overview, LinkedIn had an estimated monthly average of 51.9 million logged-in EU users between January and June this year. That’s an increase of 4 million on the logged in user numbers it reported back in April, which was a 2.7 million user increase on its previous report. So LinkedIn’s steadily adding users in the region. Not a heap, but it is growing in EU.
But that also gives us some context as to how many people are actually using LinkedIn, because we also have data on total member counts in each region.
Matching these numbers up, LinkedIn currently has:
- 184 million members in Europe
- 51.9 million logged in monthly users in EU
That means that around 28% of LinkedIn’s members in the region are actively logging into the platform regularly.
Now, that’s not the full story, because as LinkedIn notes, it also sees a lot of logged out user activity. Adding that element, the actual number of total monthly active users may be higher, so if you wanted to give LinkedIn the benefit of the doubt, you could assume that around 35% to 40% of LinkedIn’s total members are active each month in the app.
If you extrapolate that to other regions, we can confidently assume that LinkedIn has at least 280 million monthly active users, while that could be up to 400 million per month, if you were to factor in logged out use. It’s not exact, because logged out usage is less clear, but in terms of logged in users, 28% of the platform’s EU user base is logging in regularly.
So while LinkedIn would prefer to report the much better sounding “one billion members”, from what we do know, based on its transparency reports, the actual number of active, logged in users of the app is much lower.
How does that impact your ad planning? Well, maybe if you can’t reach as many people as you thought, that could make you re-think your LinkedIn approach, but then again, the platform’s audience is very unique, and you’re not going to reach them anywhere else.
So really, it might not mean a heap, and the only actual data that matters is your ad and content performance, and the audience you reach in the app.
But if you wanted more context that LinkedIn provides, this may help.
Thanks again to Xavier Degraux for the heads up on the latest reports.
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