How to Get LinkedIn Data for Analysis for Free

Pulling your data out of LinkedIn can feel like a chore, but it’s essential for understanding what’s actually working. This article will show you several free methods to export your LinkedIn data - from your personal connections to company page performance and ad campaign results - so you can finally analyze it properly.

Graphed

Still Building Reports Manually?

Watch how growth teams are getting answers in seconds — not days.

Watch the Demo

Why Bother Analyzing Your LinkedIn Data?

Diving into your LinkedIn data isn’t just about collecting numbers, it’s about discovering patterns that can sharpen your strategy. When you take the time to export and analyze this information, you can stop guessing and start making data-driven decisions that actually move the needle for your business or career.

Here are a few quick benefits:

• Refine Your Content Strategy: By analyzing your company page data, you can see exactly which posts get the most engagement. This helps you figure out whether your audience prefers videos, case studies, or quick text updates, allowing you to create more of what works and less of what doesn't.
• Measure Audience Growth: Tracking your follower demographics and growth trends tells you if you're reaching the right people. You can see which industries, job functions, and seniority levels are most represented in your audience, helping you tailor your messaging.
• Optimize Ad Spend: For marketers, exporting LinkedIn Ads data is non-negotiable. It allows you to calculate true return on investment (ROI), see which campaigns drive the most valuable leads, and identify underperforming ads before you waste more of your budget.
• Understand Your Professional Network: Your personal LinkedIn data archive gives you a searchable, sortable list of all your connections. You can analyze your network by company, job title, and location to find valuable contacts or identify gaps in your networking efforts.

Ultimately, analyzing this data turns LinkedIn from a simple social platform into a powerful tool for business intelligence.

Graphed

Still Building Reports Manually?

Watch how growth teams are getting answers in seconds — not days.

Watch the Demo

Method 1: Exporting Your Personal LinkedIn Data Archive

The most comprehensive data you can get for personal use comes directly from LinkedIn's "data archive" feature. This is a complete download of nearly everything associated with your personal profile. It’s perfect for sales professionals wanting to analyze their network, recruiters building talent pools, or anyone wanting a backup of their LinkedIn activity.

The archive includes CSV files for your connections, messages, invitations, profile information, articles you've published, comments you've left, and much more. It's a gold mine of personal networking data.

Step-by-Step Guide to Downloading Your Archive

Here’s how to request and download your personal data from LinkedIn:

1. Log in and Go to Settings: Sign into your LinkedIn account. Click on your profile picture ("Me") in the top right corner and select "Settings & Privacy" from the dropdown menu.
2. Navigate to Data Privacy: On the left-hand navigation bar, click on the "Data Privacy" section.
3. Request Your Data: In the main pane, find the section titled "How LinkedIn uses your data" and click on "Get a copy of your data."
4. Choose What to Download: LinkedIn gives you two main options. For a full analysis, you should select the "Want something in particular? Select the data files you're most interested in" option and then check the box next to "Download larger data archive." This option includes all your data categories. Alternatively, you can pick specific files like "Connections" if that's all you need.
5. Confirm and Wait: After making your selection, click "Request archive." LinkedIn will then ask you to re-enter your password to confirm your identity. The process isn't instant. LinkedIn will send you an email within 24 hours (usually much faster) with a link to download your data as a ZIP file.

What Can You Do With This Data?

Once you've downloaded and unzipped the file, you'll find a collection of CSV files. Open the Connections.csv file in Excel or Google Sheets to get started.

Here are a few simple analyses you can perform:

• Analyze Your Network Composition: Use spreadsheet filters or a pivot table to see which companies your connections work for. This is incredibly useful for B2B sales to identify top accounts or to see how deeply networked you are within a target organization. You can also sort by a connection's "Position" to see how many VPs, Directors, or C-suite executives you're connected to.
• Map Industry Connections: Are you trying to expand into a new industry? Analyze your connections to see how many people you know in that field and who might be able to offer an introduction or advice.
• Track Networking Progress: The Connections.csv file includes a "Connected On" date. You can use this to see how your networking has grown over time. For example, you could create a simple chart showing how many new connections you made each month over the past year.

Method 2: Using LinkedIn's Built-in Company Page Analytics

If you're an admin for a LinkedIn Company Page, you have access to a dashboard full of analytics that you can export for free. This is your go-to source for understanding how your content is performing and who your audience is. Unlike the personal data archive, this data is focused purely on your company's presence.

You can export data on:

• Visitors: Anonymized demographic data about who is visiting your page, including job function, seniority, industry, and company size.
• Followers: Similar demographic data for your followers, allowing you to track audience growth over time.
• Content Engagement: Post-by-post metrics including impressions, clicks, click-through rate (CTR), reactions, comments, and shares.

This export gives you the raw data you need to build content performance reports and prove the value of your LinkedIn marketing efforts.

Graphed

Still Building Reports Manually?

Watch how growth teams are getting answers in seconds — not days.

Watch the Demo

How to Export Company Page Data

Follow these steps to download your analytics:

1. Go to Your Company Page: First, ensure you're logged into LinkedIn and have admin access to the page. Navigate to your company's page.
2. Open the Analytics Tab: At the top of your page management view, click on the "Analytics" tab. You'll see several options like Visitors, Followers, Content, and Competitors.
3. Select the Data You Need: Click into the analytics section you want to export (e.g., "Content").
4. Export the Data: In the top right corner of the analytics module, you should see an "Export" button. Click it.
5. Set Your Date Range: A box will pop up allowing you to choose a time period for your data. You can usually select preset ranges (like "Last 30 days") or set a custom range. LinkedIn limits content performance exports to the last year. After selecting your range, click "Export." The file will download as an XLSX (Excel) file.

Putting Your Company Page Data to Work

Once you have your spreadsheet, you can start digging for insights:

• Identify Your Best Content: Sort the Content sheet by "Engagement rate" or "Clicks" to instantly identify your top-performing posts. Look for patterns. Do posts with images outperform text-only posts? Do video posts get more comments? Use these findings to inform your future content calendar.
• Correlate Growth with Activity: Open your Follower analytics export and place it alongside your content export. Did you see a spike in new followers after publishing a particularly successful post or running a specific event? This helps you connect content efforts to audience growth.
• Build a Simple Content Dashboard: In Google Sheets or Excel, you can create a few simple charts from your exported data. A line chart showing follower growth over time, a bar chart showing engagement by content type, and a pie chart showing your visitor demographics can form a basic but powerful monthly reporting dashboard.

Method 3: Downloading Ad Campaign Reports from Campaign Manager

For anyone running paid ads, LinkedIn Campaign Manager is the command center. While its interface offers useful dashboards, exporting the raw data allows for deeper analysis, especially when you need to combine it with data from other marketing channels or your CRM.

Campaign Manager lets you export highly granular data on:

• Performance Metrics: Impressions, clicks, CTR, average cost-per-click (CPC), cost-per-impression (CPM), and total spend.
• Conversion Data: conversions, cost per conversion, and conversion rate (assuming you have conversion tracking set up).
• Demographic Breakdowns: See how your ads performed across different job titles, company sizes, industries, and other targeting criteria.

How to Download Campaign Reports

Follow these steps:

1. Enter Campaign Manager: Log into LinkedIn and click the "Advertise" icon in the top right corner, or go directly to the Campaign Manager dashboard.
2. Select Your Ad Account: Navigate to the correct ad account you want to analyze.
3. Access the Reporting Interface: In the campaign performance table, get the view you want to analyze (e.g., filter by active campaigns or by a specific date range).
4. Click "Export": Look for the "Export" button, usually located in the top right corner of the performance table.
5. Customize Your Report: After clicking "Export," you'll typically be presented with different reporting options. You can choose a "Campaign performance" report, which is a high-level summary, or drill down into "Creative performance" or "Demographics" reports for more detail. For deep analysis, the demographics report is invaluable. Simply select a breakdown (like Job function or Company industry), set your time period, and export the report as a CSV.

Answering Key Questions with Ad Data

Your exported CSV is where the real work begins. You can create pivot tables to answer critical business questions:

• "Which specific job titles are clicking on our ads the most?" A demographic report can tell you this instantly, helping you verify that you're reaching your intended persona.
• "What's our cost per lead for each campaign?" By combining your ad spend with conversion numbers in the same spreadsheet, you can calculate your cost per lead/action for every single campaign, ad set, and creative.
• "How is our performance trending week-over-week?" By exporting reports each week, you can build a simple time-series analysis in a single spreadsheet to monitor trends in spend, clicks, and conversions, allowing you to catch problems early.

Graphed

Still Building Reports Manually?

Watch how growth teams are getting answers in seconds — not days.

Watch the Demo

The Challenge: What Manual Exports Don't Give You

While these free methods are great, they come with a few challenges that can quickly become major headaches. Manual data exports are a crucial first step, but they often lead to several recurring problems:

• They Are Time-Consuming: Logging in, navigating to the right page, setting the date range, and downloading the file might only take a few minutes. But when you have to do it every week for multiple data sources (LinkedIn, Google Analytics, your CRM, etc.), it adds up to hours of repetitive, manual labor.
• Data Is Siloed: Your LinkedIn ad data lives in one file, your company page engagement data lives in another, and your website traffic from LinkedIn lives somewhere else entirely. Getting a complete view of your marketing funnel requires painstakingly stitching these separate CSVs together in a master spreadsheet - a process that's prone to copy-paste errors.
• Reports Are Always Stale: The moment you download a report, it's a snapshot of the past. If your boss asks a follow-up question in a meeting a few hours later, your data is already outdated. There's no way to get a real-time view without starting the manual export process all over again.
• Complexity Balloons Quickly: As your analysis gets more sophisticated, so does your spreadsheet. Soon you're managing dozens of tabs, complex VLOOKUPs, and brittle pivot tables that break if a single column is out of place.

Final Thoughts

Getting your hands on your LinkedIn data for free is entirely possible using the platform's built-in export features. You can download a personal archive to analyze your network, export company page analytics to guide your content strategy, and pull campaign reports to optimize your ad spend. These methods provide the raw materials you need to move beyond guesswork.

We built Graphed because we were tired of the weekly ritual of downloading those same CSVs and wrangling them in spreadsheets. Instead of doing it all manually, our platform connects directly to your LinkedIn Pages and Ads accounts (alongside Google Analytics, Shopify, and dozens of others) so all your data is in one place and always up-to-date. You can instantly create real-time dashboards just by asking questions in simple English, like, "Compare my LinkedIn Ads cost per conversion to Facebook last quarter" and get a live, shareable report in seconds.