We all recognise the vital importance of recruitment marketing in the modern era; however, you can have the best and most well-intentioned plan in existence, but without monitoring its efficacy, there will be little indication about whether it’s working, and few ideas how to adapt it if it’s not.
Even firms that are monitoring their output often tend to focus on the so-called ‘vanity’ metrics over those that offer any real insight or deeper understanding. These include the number of social media followers – without any knowledge of who they are – or the traffic the organisational website has secured without knowing the more valuable data about how long they stayed on the site, which pages they visited and more.
As a result, we have mapped out the top marketing analytics for recruitment agencies that all marketing teams should be monitoring and measuring on Google Analytics to assess the performance of their recruitment marketing strategies
Before starting, it’s also worth mentioning the move to Google Analytics 4 (GA4) and away from Universal Analytics, which marks a shift for agencies, particularly when it comes to tracking candidate behaviour and campaign performance. GA4 moves from session-based tracking to an event-driven model, allowing more granular insights into user interactions, which is ideal for activities including monitoring job ad engagement, application drop-offs, and referral sources. It also enables cross-platform tracking, so agencies can follow a candidate’s journey across devices, from initial click to completed application.
Equally, and unlike its predecessor, GA4 doesn’t rely on cookies alone and offers predictive metrics, such as churn probability and potential revenue, which can further inform retargeting strategies. While the learning curve is potentially steeper, GA4’s flexibility and future-proofing make it essential for agencies serious about optimising their marketing spend and improving candidate conversion.
Discovering where website pages and content rank on Google for the keywords they have been search engine optimised for is essential. After all, if a new blog post is receiving little to no organic traffic whilst receiving plenty from social it requires further investigation to uncover the reasons why.
To help agencies discover their current SEO rankings, there are many different software options and paid services available for agency marketers, including SEMRush, Ahrefs and Moz Pro. They are all relatively straightforward to use and enable businesses to understand how effectively the website is optimised. Without this knowledge, it’s nigh-on impossible to properly gauge performance.
Fairly obviously, an agency’s website is its central repository and for 99.99% of agencies will act as the main port of call for most information for clients and candidates. Therefore, measuring traffic is vital, and content on all other channels, such as social media, email marketing and job ads, should aim to drive visitors back to it. Having an understanding of traffic sources also supports a deeper knowledge of the efficacy of wider marketing operations. While the focus should be on quality over quantity, being able to benchmark this number and measure its growth over time is incredibly useful. When combined with the other metrics outlined in this blog, it will allow marketers to highlight key trends and adapt their recruitment marketing strategy where necessary.
However, there is a new factor to consider: AI. Google and other comparable platforms all now offer AI functionality, and – increasingly – many users are adopting LLMs such as ChatGPT and CoPilot for their search functionality; in fact, 83% prefer them over traditional search engines. Subsequently, all agencies will now have to incorporate this into their thinking, and if web traffic is falling, it could be because the organisation is, in its place, picking up more artificial intelligence citations.
Assessing the quality and origin of the website traffic is equally essential, and there are several tactics marketers can adopt to drill down and discover where users are originating from. For example, they can filter by traffic channel, which provides information on top-level channel source, such as email marketing, social media and organic search. In addition, there is also the source and medium, which displays where the traffic originated from, for example, Google or Organic, and now AI - and the referral traffic, which shows the website or platform that referred the traffic to the site, such as LinkedIn.
Collectively, this data enables marketers to determine the origin of their traffic and review whether adaptations are needed in order to deliver the best ROI. For example, if there is a large amount of traffic coming from LinkedIn but only a handful of visits from Facebook, the content and supporting information being shared on the latter should be reviewed to increase referral numbers.
A ‘bounce’ represents a single-page session on your website and essentially means that someone has visited a webpage from a traffic source and then exited without taking any other action.
Traditionally, a high bounce rate is seen as a negative, but it actually depends on the page that the user lands on. For example, if the 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 the organisation does as a business or the jobs it is 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 the user has found the information they are looking for.
While not quite as advanced as some of the other metrics on this list, location is a metric that still remains relevant. After all, a job is being advertised in Glasgow, and a large chunk of landing page traffic stems from Exeter or Bournemouth, then something isn’t working as it should. Or if a regional recruitment firm is receiving website visits from people in locations that are hundreds of miles away, this again suggests there may be an issue with the search engine optimisation of the page.
Monitoring the proportion of users who are either returning to the website for repeat visits or are first-time viewers offers further insights into what works and what doesn’t. For example, a high user retention is likely to show that 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 the company as a trusted source for career advice.
Goals can be set up and monitored to provide all users with completion rates and tangible outcomes that can be fed back to the wider team, including actions such as submitting a CV, registering as a candidate or signing up for an e-newsletter. These are another detailed indicator that enables marketers to gauge the outcomes of their marketing strategies, and review them in order to further boost candidate and client acquisition activity.
Once these metrics and other datapoints have been gathered, the next focus must be on seemingly dull data hygiene tasks that actually provide a huge amount of value, and act as the foundation of trustworthy analytics. If the ingredients are rotten, then the final product will be ruined, and the same principle applies to data; a lack of accuracy will only lead to bad calls being made. Once cleansed, the metrics can be reviewed in a dashboard where they can be easily monitored, which will make the process of making informed, data-backed decisions regarding content and marketing strategies that much easier in the future.
If your agency is looking for guidance on how to optimise its output, get in touch with our team today.
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