Digital Publishing Platforms
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4 charts: The state of publisher referral traffic from LinkedIn

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Referral traffic to publishers from LinkedIn has had its ups and downs, but for the last eight months, it has been on a steady uptick as publishers tweak their editorial strategies.

In January, publishers saw traffic to their sites from LinkedIn explode, in some cases tripling. Since this spike, referral traffic has continued growing steadily. The spike was attributed to a change in attribution: Traffic formerly credited to dark social was confirmed as actually coming from the social network. Here are four charts on the state of publisher traffic from LinkedIn.

According to data from analytics firm Chartbeat, since January the amount of traffic to publishers referred from LinkedIn has grown from 0.15 percent to 0.25 percent. (Before the spike in January, it was closer to 0.011 percent of total referral traffic).

This may seem tiny — by comparison, 40 percent of publisher referral traffic comes from Google, 30 percent from Facebook — but it’s a significant amount, according to Josh Schwartz, chief of engineering and data science at Chartbeat, and it puts LinkedIn into the top-10 referrers of the web.

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