Ask a recruiter to tell you one thing they don’t fully understand, don’t feel they have time for and yet know is important and it’s likely to be the same thing again and again.
Analytics.
Some people thrive on data and numbers, others want to run a mile at the very thought of looking into metrics and pulling out useful data from it. Yet monitoring data in any area of recruitment is vital to understanding how successfully your business is operating and what you can do to improve it. And recruitment website analytics are no different.
Navigating web analytics tools and extracting meaningful data can feel daunting and overwhelming. However, it’s also vital to understand what’s working and what’s not in order to achieve the highest ROI. And the good news is that it doesn’t have to be scary or complicated.
Why should I monitor my website’s analytics?
Think of analytics as the fly on the wall with the ability to see all the comings and goings of visitors on your website, plus what they’re doing when they’re there. When you know where people are coming from, how long they spend on your website and where they’re spending their time, you can identify what you’re doing right and what needs improvement and make adjustments accordingly. With access to website metrics, especially visitor behaviour, you’ll also be able to form and/or improve your recruitment marketing strategy.
Monitoring your website’s analytics will bring you myriad benefits, helping to boost the performance of your website and therefore your business as a whole. You’ll be able to:
- Enhance the user experience – understanding how visitors behave on your website will help you to fine-tune their journeys, creating a better UX and encouraging them to perform the actions that will bring them closer to converting.
- Understand engagement levels – are your visitors clicking on your calls to action or are they leaving your website with no further interaction? Driving high volumes of traffic to your website is pointless if those visitors are going to bounce off without engaging, let alone converting. Understanding engagement rates, as well as where users are engaging and where they’re not, will help you to adjust elements to focus on boosting engagement across your website.
- Optimise marketing budgets and activities – If you’re investing in paid ads or are running a specific campaign that directs people to your website, you’ll be able to see how well these activities are working. You can also use analytics to direct your budget and efforts into the right places based on where visitors are coming from.
- Create better content – when you know what content users are engaging with (and what they’re not), you can start to create more of what they want to read, see or listen to.
- Increase conversions – the ultimate aim of tracking metrics, analysing and acting on them is to increase quality applications to your jobs, bring more of the right candidates into your talent pool, gain more clients and therefore more jobs.
What metrics should I be monitoring?
Knowing what to monitor is the first hurdle. Narrowing down the data that is meaningful to your business amongst the huge volume of data available can feel overwhelming. We recommend tracking the main website performance metrics, including the number of sessions, engagement rate, and conversion rate.
These crucial metrics will tell you the volume of traffic to your website, how engaged your visitors are and the percentage of visitors that convert. Together, they will give you an immediate understanding of how successfully your website is attracting the right type of visitors and converting them into candidates, clients or consultants.
Other key recruitment website metrics include:
- Number of visits over time – this will tell you which points of the year you’re getting a greater flow of traffic so that you can run campaigns at the best time.
- Traffic by channel, device type and location – knowing where your visitors are coming from, through what means and via what device gives you the knowledge to know what and where you should be targeting, in turn helping to grow your traffic.
- User engagement by source – this measures how engaged users are based on where they come from, which can help identify which sources are driving the most valuable traffic.
- Goal conversion trend – this allows you to assess the success of the goals that you are measuring for your website by tracking the percentage of users who took a desired action that you have set up on your website. Those goals might be filling out and submitting a form, submitting a job application, registering an account, etc.
- Number of organic visits – increasing the number of visitors to your site that have come from regular searches on search engines (ie those that haven’t clicked on a paid ad) should always be a goal as they are the holy grail of inbound marketing. Not only is organic traffic free, organic visitors tend to be more intent-driven – Wave research has found that organic traffic generates the greatest volume of applications and CV uploads.
- Organic keywords for your website – check that the keywords that you are using to attract free traffic on search engines are ranking well. Keyword research is crucial and you can use Google Search Console to check where you rank in searches for your organic keywords and which need better optimisation. To improve your ranking for important organic keywords you can incorporate them into your content (without overstuffing them) and use them in title tags, meta descriptions, headings, subheadings and URLs.
What’s important to take into consideration here is that analytics are rarely useful or truly reflective of the performance of your website in isolation – they need to be looked at alongside other performance indicator metrics to make sense. For example, high visit numbers are great but if, in conjunction with that, engagement rate is low or bounce rate is high, that indicates issues that need resolving. Perhaps page speed is low, your CTAs aren’t working or you’re using the wrong keywords which means the traffic isn’t relevant.
Is there an easy way to track and view important metrics?
Google Analytics is the most popular tool for monitoring website analytics and it’s easy to see why – it’s simple to use and you can set up custom reports with an analytics dashboard. This is where you can start to really get comfortable with your website’s analytics as, rather than a ream of data to wade through, the dashboard allows you to view important metrics in an easy-to-view way.
Since Google’s Universal Analytics was sunsetted in favour of Google Analytics 4, it’s a bit more challenging to create a dashboard but website providers such as WaveSites equip websites with a customised analytics dashboard that displays data directly from your Google Analytics account and Google Search Console in a simple, visual way. With an analytics dashboard you can easily view important metrics without digging into multiple reports. This is crucial as it’s this that makes it possible to quickly see and understand the data you need without a data analyst pulling the information and making it comprehensible.
Analytics is for everyone
Monitoring analytics isn’t just for data analysts and SEO experts. Once your dashboard is set up with the data you want to track, it’s simple to monitor it and understand the results. And the extra insights you will gain from the data you collect and analyse are worth the initial work. You’ll be able to gain a better understanding of your users and how they interact with your website, leading to a website that will attract more candidates and clients.
Want to know more? For further information on what website analytics you should monitor and why it matters, we recommend:
✍️ The website analytics all recruitment agencies should monitor
✍️ Get the most from Google Analytics 4
🎧 Recruitment Cheat Codes: Recruitment website analytics essentials
