This guide will cover the most common kinds of discrepancies seen when querying LinkedIn Company Pages. Unless specified in the section, all guidance within should apply to all Supermetrics products that support the LinkedIn Company Pages connector.
Quick links to each section:
- Discrepancies Caused by UTC Reporting Time
- System Delays in Data Calculation
- Field Selection/Using Wrong Report Type
Discrepancies Caused by UTC Reporting Time
The API and the export reports from LinkedIn for the company pages are both in UTC, so the values reported back for a given time range may be affected by this. Depending on which time zone you are in, you may need to adjust the date range forward or back by one day to get data that matches the reporting.
For example, if checking update impressions for the report date range of January 1st, 2019 to January 7th, 2019 in the Helsinki time zone, the export report and the API will both return data from Dec 31st, 2018 to January 6th, 2019 due to the time difference.
Export report from LinkedIn Pages Analytics:
Two queries in Supermetrics for Google Sheets showing that even though the date is set to January 1st to 7th, the data is truly from December 31st to January 6th.
So to get the data for the actual dates of January 1st to January 7th, in this case with the Helsinki time zone, the query would need to actually get set to January 2nd to January 8th, which when adjusted, will be the right days. Note that the date adjustment will depend on which direction you are from UTC +0 (if forward, you need to add a day; if back, remove a day).
System Delays in Data Calculation
The documentation for the LinkedIn Company Pages API notes the following delays that may occur in data fetched though API:
- Follower Statistics: Endpoint requests up to 12 months in the past and up to 2 days before the request date (aka end date of your query). So this may mean up to 2 days of delay on current follower data. (More info)
- Likes and Comments for Updates/Posts: These may not align with the UI due to the fact that likes and comment counts are not decremented if removed/deleted. The counts may not be consistent with the UI for up to 48 hours. (More info)
- Updates/Post metrics: May be delayed up to 48 hours.
Field Selection/Using Wrong Report Type
The data source contains several fields that appear to be the same metrics, but are actually from different report types/end-points and have different calculations. Here's some common sets that get confused, with details on what each does:
- Total impressions (from Share Totals) -> Lifetime count of all post/share impressions for the page
- Impressions (from Share Statistics) -> Time-based count of post/share impressions (affected by date range, is splittable by date/month)
- Total comments (from Share Totals) -> Lifetime count of all post/share comments for the page
- Comments (from Share Statistics) -> Time-based count of post/share impressions (affected by date range, is splittable by date/month)
- Update comments (from Update Details) -> Count of comments for a specific post/share, use with Update ID dimension
Escalating to Support
If you've checked everything above and you still believe that Supermetrics has a discrepancy with the results in LinkedIn Company Pages UI, then please gather the following information and place it in a new Support request:
- A screenshot showing the incorrect value in the Supermetrics product
- A screenshot showing the configuration of the query in Supermetrics that is incorrect (or the query ID if using Google Sheets)
- A copy of the Export Report .XLS file for the same date range as the Supermetrics Query. You can get this from the Analytics section of the LinkedIn Pages UI here. Note that the type of data will depend on which analytics section was active when you clicked "Export". (Update Analytics - Shares/Updates/Posts; Visitors Analytics - Page metrics/Visitor job details; Follower Analytics - Follower details)
Then set the date to match your query.
Note that as the reporting is in UTC, even though the example above shows January 1st to January 7th, the actual report period is December 31, 2018 to January 6th due to the time zone. This is expected and correct behavior.
