Google Analytics, you know it’s important but why haven’t you set it up properly?
By: Duncan Carter
Tags: Marketing, Analytics, Google Analytics, Recruitment, Recruitment Marketing

We have seen and read a lot about the ongoing war for talent. As job seekers gain the upper hand in the recruiting process, companies and their recruiters have had to step up their efforts or risk losing top talent to the competition. This has led to the growing importance of the candidate experience and employer branding, among other relatively recent talent acquisition initiatives.

As our work in recruitment and hiring becomes more digital, we need tools, reporting, and metrics that help us understand the needs, interests, and activities of our candidates for the positions we are recruiting for not to mention the specific company brand. Thankfully there are ways in order to accomplish this that require some planning, but provide talent acquisition leaders with a more holistic look at the digital recruiting landscape.

Google Analytics is a free tool for websites to monitor online web activity and visitor reporting. The reporting tool allows for recruiting teams to monitor activity on their site allowing them to better understand online job seeker behaviours and habits. This tool allows recruiters to gather more data and information around online sources of job seeker traffic including social media, job boards, and employee reviews sites which then allows recruiting teams to better assess the ROI of your digital recruiting tools and strategies.

Analytics in recruitment has historically been a fickle mistress. Everyone knows it’s important, but placing code on specific web pages and tracking exactly where people are coming from and making sense of all that data is tough for many marketers. So, you can imagine the herculean challenge site metrics can be for a recruiter or HR executive.

While many industry folks have access to some recruitment marketing analytics through vendor dashboards and applicant tracking platforms, it is often difficult to understand the performance of all of your job ads across multiple sources. It becomes additionally tough when job postings are being thrown around and duplicated all around the web, usually without an employer even knowing.

One of the most important metrics that Google Analytics provides is a breakdown of website traffic sources. You can see whether visitors came to your site via organic search (Google, Bing, Yahoo, etc.), direct to your site (entering in your URL, bookmarks, etc.), social media, or referral sources. This information helps marketers adjust their overall digital marketing strategy, and it can help recruiters in much the same way.

As someone who has used Google Analytics for years, I know it can be extremely daunting and challenging when first using it. The amount of information available is overwhelming. So instead of worrying about tracking and looking at everything, instead choose a few of the most important metrics to start. Google Analytics can be extremely valuable for recruitment teams and can greatly assist in improving your overall strategy and results. Don’t be afraid of becoming a data-driven recruiter!

Another cool thing you can find out is which career site pages are bringing in the most traffic (landing pages). Perhaps your career site homepage isn’t your top landing page, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. But having this knowledge can help you edit your website accordingly, and perhaps make efforts to direct even more traffic to your most popular landing page. Anything you can do to drive more traffic should be your recruitment marketing goal.

Adding a segment to your Analytics can tell you more accurately how the traffic of one specific web page performs compared to the traffic of all users that are coming from different sources. With these numbers, you can compare which source brings better conversion, check the costs, and calculate how much you get in return.

At this point you might be wondering how, exactly, Google Analytics can make your life easier as a recruiter. Well, for starters, it can help you to figure out where your web traffic is actually coming from. This might not sound like a big deal, but consider a few scenarios: you’re running a recruitment advertising campaign aimed at millennial front-end programmers.

You’re placing ads through Facebook and Google Ads, and what you find through Google Analytics is that a large percentage of the users who follow the ad’s CTA back to your website are doing so from a mobile phone. If you already provide a mobile-friendly application flow, you might not have to do very much with this knowledge (though you might consider making a foray into mobile-only channels like Snapchat). But, if you’re not offering a mobile-friendly job application, your analytics gives you a compelling reason to do so — i.e. that potential applicants are reaching you via smartphones and you might do well to prioritise their applicant experience.

Your Google Analytics event goals are likely to succeed where your KPIs become more aligned as opposed to more abstract and interpretative such as changing your campaigns due to the duration spent on certain pages. However, all types of goals are equally as important; without tailoring the right content for your visitors, you may not get the event goals you’re looking for. If you’re new to Google Analytics in recruitment, then best practice would be to strike a good balance of types of goal, to see which most affect your website’s performance, get a good ratio of each type of goal to accurately measure how successfully your website is performing.

Other tools you should consider.

Contact me today if you need help setting this up. I specialise in Recruitment Marketing. Website Design, Lead Generation, Digital Marketing and SEO & Analytics.