It’s easy to feel overwhelmed and confused when it comes to website analytics, especially when the sheer amount of data that is now available to us is vast. However, tracking the right metrics is essential in order to ensure your recruitment website performs, bringing you a steady stream of candidates, clients and consultants. Wave‘s Emily Buckley has written a handy guide, recommending the website metrics you should be tracking and monitoring, and how to do it.
Unless you’re a data analyst, website analytics can seem confusing and overwhelming. However, tracking and analysing key metrics on your recruitment website is vital in order to understand how it is performing and to therefore be able to make improvements and boost its ROI. The good news is that you don’t have to have a degree in data science to monitor your website’s analytics and, more importantly, understand them.
What are website analytics and how can they help?
Website analytics refers to a process rather than an entity. It is the process of collecting key data on your website in order to analyse and then report on it. Monitoring your website analytics is essential in order to optimise your website, helping you to drive more quality candidates, clients and consultants to your recruitment business and convert them. Analytics can help you to understand visitor behaviour and improve the user experience, refine and target your marketing campaigns, boost your search engine ranking to drive more relevant traffic to your website, and ultimately increase conversions. What can be challenging is choosing which data to track and understanding what the results mean.
Avoid data overwhelm – target metrics to monitor
In some ways, we’re fortunate to have so much data to help formulate marketing strategies – it wasn’t so long ago that it was far harder to understand a website’s performance. In the 1990s, for example, just 2 metrics were measured – page views and visits. But the sheer amount of data available to us today can be utterly overwhelming. And that’s why you need to be targeted about the data you collect, track and analyse. What do you really want to know? What would help you to understand how your website is performing and what you can do to improve it?
What data should I measure?
If you’ve asked yourself the questions above, the answers should help to inform the decisions you make on the metrics you want to measure. If you’re still unsure, we recommend tracking these to help you to get a handle on how your website is performing so that you can adapt based on what’s working and what’s not.
- Number of sessions – A session begins the moment a user lands on your website and ends after 30 minutes of inactivity. This will give you a broad overview of how often your website is visited.
- Engagement rate – This measures the percentage of engaged sessions, i.e. the percentage of sessions in which visitors engage with content in some way, such as clicks, scrolls, or watching a video. An engaged session must last longer than 10 seconds, trigger at least one conversion goal, and include two or more page views.
- User engagement by source – This metric will help you to understand the engagement of visitors based on the source they arrive from. This can help you to pinpoint which sources provide the most valuable traffic, allowing you to concentrate your marketing efforts in the right places.
- Goal conversion rate – Achieving a good volume of incoming traffic should be one of your website goals but ensuring the quality of that traffic is vital. And that is where the goal conversion rate comes in. This will tell you the percentage of visitors that convert from browsers to engaged users that complete one of a set of conversion actions that you have set up as goals. For a recruitment website, this might be applying for a job, registering a CV, submitting a contact form, or signing up for a newsletter.
- Number of visits over time – This will tell you the number of times your website is visited within a specific period of time, helping you to spot visit trends. This can in turn help you to assess the performance of campaigns and choose the right time to run campaigns.
- Traffic by channel, device type and location – Knowing where your visitors come from and what they’re using to access your website is hugely valuable, especially if you are running any marketing campaigns, such as paid ads, an email campaign, or a social media drive, as you’ll get a good idea of whether they are working. The amount of organic traffic you receive will also help to inform you about whether your SEO is working.
- Number of organic visits – Increasing your organic traffic (visitors that land on your website from an unpaid search source) should be a goal for any website. Not only is it a free source, Wave research has found that organic traffic generates the greatest volume of applications and CV uploads. That is because organic visitors tend to be more intent-driven.
- Organic keyword rankings – Organic keywords are the keywords chosen for their SEO to attract organic traffic to your website. 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 description, headings and subheadings.
How do I track and view important metrics?
A web analytics tool will help you to track the metrics you want to analyse. There are several out there but Google Analytics remains the most popular – it’s free to use and you can create custom reports with an analytics dashboard. If you don’t already use Google Analytics 4 you’ll need to set it up and add tracking code to your pages. Your website provider should be able to do this for you but there’s advice online on how to do this if not.
A worthwhile investment of time
Website analytics give you vital insight into how your website is performing. Is it attracting the right people at the right time? It it engaging those visitors? Is it converting those people into active candidates applying for jobs, clients that want to invest in your services, consultants that want to join your agency? Without knowing the answers to those questions, your website could be hugely underperforming, hampering your growth efforts and damaging your ROI. It is well worth taking the time to track, monitor and act on analytics in order to increase the success of your recruitment business. Time may be money in recruitment but investing time in the right areas can equally boost profits.
Wave aims to create a world where talent is never missed by providing an all-in-one candidate attraction solution through a combination of technology, data and human expertise via WaveTrackR (data-powered candidate sourcing tool, multi-poster, and analytics platform), WaveSites (high-performance recruitment websites) and WaveMedia (strategic recruitment media buying).
