Recruitment marketing is a vital function for firms of all sizes, yet it can be incredibly difficult to know what we should be measuring and how. Too often recruitment marketers rely on vanity metrics, such as the number of social media followers they have acquired or the website traffic their site receives, which ultimately do not drive many relevant opportunities for business development.
To help you with this, I have rounded up seven of the most important, and often overlooked, marketing metrics that you can use on Google Analytics to assess the performance of your recruitment marketing strategy.
7 marketing analytics that all recruitment firms should be measuring
1. SEO rankings
Discovering where your website pages and content rank on Google for the keywords they have been search engine optimised for is essential. After all, if you’ve noticed that your latest blog post is receiving little to no organic traffic whilst receiving plenty from social you will need to investigate and find out why this is.
To help you discover your current SEO rankings there are many different software options and paid services out there. However, I recommend SERP Robot as it’s free and simple to use. This requires you to enter the keyphrases that you have optimised each webpage for and then it brings up a list of where they currently rank on Google.
2. Traffic volume
Measuring the traffic volume of your recruitment firm’s website is incredibly important. Whether your agency has local branches or not, your website is your virtual store and you should be utilising all of your recruitment marketing channels, such as social media, email marketing and job ads to drive traffic to it so that you can nurture prospects over time depending on the actions that they take.
While it’s about having quality over quantity being able to benchmark this number and measuring its growth over time is incredibly useful. When combined with the other metrics in this blog this will allow you to highlight key trends and adapt your recruitment marketing strategy where necessary.
3. Traffic source
Assessing the quality of your website traffic is essential. Measuring your website’s traffic sources really helps you with this as it allows you to filter by a number of methods to drill down and discover where users are coming from to view your website’s content.
For example, you can filter by traffic channel – where you can see the top level channel source, such as email marketing, social media and organic search, the source and medium – which displays where the traffic originated from, for example, Google/Organic, and the referral traffic – which shows you the website or platform that referred the traffic to your site, such as LinkedIn.
This enables you to see where you are getting the majority of your traffic sources from and review whether you need to adapt your time and resources in order to deliver the best ROI. For example, if you have a large amount of traffic coming from LinkedIn but only a handful of visits from Facebook you should look at the content you are pushing out on there and look at what you could be doing differently to increase these referral numbers.
4. Bounce rate
A ‘bounce’ is a single-page session on your website. This means that someone has visited a webpage from a traffic source and has exited the site without taking any other action.
Traditionally, a high bounce rate is seen as a negative but it depends on the page that they land on. For example, if your homepage is suffering a high bounce rate then that, of course, should raise a red flag as it shows that visitors aren’t clicking to learn more about what you do as a business or the jobs you are currently recruiting for.
However, if a blog post is experiencing a high bounce rate then this may not necessarily be a bad thing as it could show that your user has found the information they are looking for.
5. Location
Location is a metric that is often overlooked for some of the more quantitative ones that Google Analytics provides. However, if you have a job ad on your site for an HR Director position in Birmingham and a large percentage of those landing page visitors are from Exeter and Glasgow, you should be using this data to help understand why.
Or if you’re a regional recruitment firm and are receiving website visits from people in locations that are hundreds of miles away this again provides you with insights that indicate there may be an issue with the search engine optimisation of the page.
6. New vs. returning visitors
Monitoring how many users are returning to your website provides you with insights into what is working well and why they are visiting your site on a regular basis. For example, a high user retention is likely to show that your visitors are still looking for a job and that the blog content offers them plenty of value which will be a key factor in them returning as they will view you as a trusted source for career advice.
7. Goals
Goals are actions that can be set up and monitored to provide you with completion rates and tangible outcomes that you can feed back to the wider team. These are often actions such as submitting a CV, registering as a candidate or signing up for an e-newsletter.
These allow you to clearly see the online outcomes of your recruitment marketing strategy and provide you with a clear way to review those activities that are designed to drive candidate acquisition and make adjustments for future campaigns.
These are just seven of the many different metrics that Google Analytics enables you to use. However, when used together these will enable you to produce detailed insights that you can utilise to assess how effective your recruitment marketing activities are.
