LinkedIn Experiment: Link in Post VS Link in Comment

You must have noticed a trend by now on your LinkedIn feed.

It’s when a LinkedIn user instead of copying and pasting the URL they want to share, they paste the link on the first comment below the post.

The reason behind this is this: Higher reach (we’ll see later why). But does a higher reach make up for a harder-to-find link / Call to Action?

Let’s get right into it!

Hypothesis

Pasting a link in comment results in less clicks.

My hypothesis was that posting a link in the comment makes it so difficult for everyone that the potential higher reach would not be enough.

Experiment Setup

To test this theory, we made observations of different variables.

To eliminate the number of connections factor, we used 4 LinkedIn accounts. Two of these accounts, Profiles C&D, had few connections (a bit over 1k), while the other two accounts, Profiles A&B, had more connections – over 20k connections each.

We ran our test for 8 weeks. With one post per week, that meant 8 posts per profile – 32 posts in total.

To eliminate other factors such as time, date and gender, the profiles were male, working for the same growth hacking agency, posting every Friday at noon, with the same body text and image.

In addition, Profiles A&C would post the ‘Link in Post’ format, henceforth LiP, the first time. The second time, they would post the ‘Link in Comment’ format, henceforth LiC. The third time they would post in LiP format etc.

Likewise, profiles B&D would post LiP and LiC posts alternatively, starting with the LiP format.

So the planning looked like this:

For example here are the the posts of week#3. During that week, Profiles A&C (Vasileios & Sotiris) made LiP post, while Profiles B&D (Thanasis & Alexandros) made a LiC post.

All profiles posting the same post at the same time

The Experiment

To test our hypothesis, “Pasting a link in comment results in fewer clicks,” we had to measure all these Clicks.

To keep track of the number of clicks, we used some good ol’ UTM’s.

Here’s how the UTM Google Sheet looked like by the end of the experiment.

To gain some additional knowledge, we also measured Reach.

To track Reach, each profile owner was making a print screen one week after each post. Like we did with clicks when they were also measured after 1 week.

FYI, the Reach number on LinkedIn is erased automatically after 2 months. This data won’t stay forever.

If you are looking to keep track of this particular metric, you need to do so manually and on-time. Notice how I can see the reach for my 1-month old blog post about The Top Digital Marketing Articles for 2018. However, this is not the case for my 2-months post about an Email Outreach Step-by-Step Guide.

Data such as Reach are automatically erased by LinkedIn after some time

So for those of you who had noticed that they couldn’t see the views count on all of their posts: now you know.

The Results

8 weeks passed, and I finally started bringing all those numbers together.

This is what the numbers look like on a single chart, for all weeks, for all profiles.

To draw some conclusions, let’s brake it down a bit.

Reach

Ιt was common knowledge that LiC format has the blessings of the LinkedIn algorithm. It doesn’t include an immediate call-to-action which will bring the user out of the social media platform, thus the algorithm pushes it more. How much more though?

The average reach for all format LiP posts was 3,514.

For LiC, it was 10,095.

LiC equals to 2.9X times more reach!

But what about the clicks, which is what about we are really here for?

Clicks

Now, the real deal.

It turns out that LiP format post would be clicked about 20 times on average, whereas posts with LiC format was clicked 53,5 on average.

Do the math, and you will find out that LiC format was clicked 2.7X times more.

We have a winner: A link in the comment is clicked more.

Click-Through-Rate

CTR is the clicks : reach ratio.

Sure, when we examine reach and clicks as separate numbers, reach A is smaller than reach B and so are the clicks. What is the ratio number, though?

Which format is actually more clickable?

Don’t hold your breath – this was pretty much a tie.

CTR had no significant difference. Here are the Total CTR’s for each profile:

Which made me wonder. How is a direct URL with a large clickable image not more convincing than a sentence that reads “Link on the first comment,” where you have to scroll a bit more and then click a blue text with the link? The human factor is so unpredictable after all.

For the record, LiP CTR was 0.0588% while LiC CTR was 0.592% on average.

Experiment Rerun [2021]

The experiment was initially conducted in late 2018 and published in February 2019.

So, more than two years later, we asked ourselves: Do our findings still hold true?

What better way to answer our questions with another experiment!

This time, however, the experiment’s setting was a bit different. The experiment ran for 8 weeks as well but for 2 profiles: GrowthRocks company page and my personal profile.

As with the first run, the profiles posted LiP and LiC posts alternatively. So here are our findings.