Let’s talk about Google Analytics.
Let’s also talk about why it is important to you as a talent marketer to get familiar with Google Analytics, and regularly keep taps on how your talent marketing works for you.
What Google Analytics is in short?
GA is a free website analytics tool to get insight about how people get on your website, which pages they look at, how much time they spend on your site, or do they leave as soon as they arrived.
To get this data, you need to have your unique tracking code set on your website. You get this code when you create an account at the Google Analytics website.
If you work for an established company, it is highly likely your website is already being tracked by GA, and all you need to do is find out who in your company has the ownership of your website analytics.
As a note, the business you work for may use an alternative tool for your website analytics. In that case, the same logic applies to why you need to follow your career and recruitment site analytics, and what value it will generate you as a talent marketer.
What website data talent marketers need to track?
Your primary interest as a talent marketer is to know what happens on your career site and recruitment related pages. If you also use your company blog content in talent marketing, you want to follow that as well.
Your website analytics is able to tell you a vast amount of information about what your website visitors do on your website, how they got there and when they leave, what was the last page they looked at.
Because there are so much data available, you really only want to follow a few things regularly in order to fight data fatigue and get some sense out of the data. Data means nothing if presented as a single value. What you need to do is follow regularly the same data to understand the trend of it. Only then it starts to talk to you and show you exceptions to the normality.
Data means nothing if presented as a single value. What you need to do is follow regularly the same data to understand the trend of it. Only then it starts to talk to you and show you exceptions to the normality.
A few examples of what to track in talent marketing
New and returning website visitors
When you do consistent employer branding, you want to know how it affects the traffic to your website, and especially to your career site.
New visitors tell you how your efforts to build awareness are working.
Returning visitors give you an indication about growing affinity.
When you regularly and consistently practice talent marketing, and use other media and channels to drive traffic to your career site, you should expect a growing trend in your visitor numbers. If there is no growing trend, your marketing is not working.
You can also use this information in your recruitment marketing, and track new and returning visitors to your job post.
How long your visitors stay on your career site (pages)
You can track this both as a general bounce rate which indicates your career site content fails to maintain a visitor’s interest or analyzing actual pages and looking at the seconds and minutes spent on each of the page.
If you use blog content in your talent marketing, and tailor the content to grow awareness and interest of your talent audiences, tracking which blog posts are the most popular can indicate topic related preferences of your target audiences.
Most popular blog content
You are able to generate a list of which blog articles are the most popular on your website.
You can use this data for example to:
- Optimize what blog topics you continue to get written about and marketed to your talent audiences.
- Understand what genre of talent you are able to attract and get attention of. Is it the right audience or should you make changes to what you market.
How people find your website and your content
While GA only tracks what a visitor does on your website, it is able to track where they were when they next landed to your website.
- Which social media continues to generate most traffic to your site or page?
- Is it organic traffic or paid traffic?
If you are for example paying for Facebook advertising, but most of your (career) site visitors come from LinkedIn, it’s worth to start analyzing why your Facebook advertising is not working and what’s going on with LinkedIn.
Now, it is worth to know that the data you get from GA is not as accurate as if you also use additional tools such as the Tag Manager. But for the sake of simplicity, I will cut some corners here to focus on the basics.
Check out this blog post about Google Tag Manager and how to use it >>
What is the value of Google Analytics for a Talent Marketer?
While the true value you want from your Google Analytics depends on what your talent marketing goals are, one great example of proper value generated has to do with recruitment marketing.
A very typical case in a recruitment campaign is this:
- You invest in advertising and promoting your vacancy on social media and job boards.
- Data tells you your marketing is working:
- People are clicking your job post open (be it on a job board or on your own site).
- People are spending time reading your job post (on your own site).
- There are a lot off returning visitors to your job post (on your site) indicating people are considering your opportunity.
- The apply now -button gets clicked a lot (on your own site).
But you are not getting applications. What’s wrong?
Often times, it’s easy to blame the marketing. But if your data tells marketing is working, what can be wrong then?
A very common problem is in your recruitment system: the application process is too complex.
People get all the way to start the application process, but something in the process is putting them off.
- Might be a form they need to fill.
- Could be too many steps still in between applying..
Your website data is able to give you an incredible amount of information, facts about how your marketing is working. Or is it?
And if you follow your data regularly, your data teaches you how to improve your marketing. What’s not to love about your website analytics!
Listen to episode #56
In this week’s episode of Building a Modern Employer Brand -podcast, we will talk about Google Analytics.
Understanding your talent marketing data gives you so much clarity into how what you are doing actually works.
Learning to listen to what your data tells you is the only way you ever know what really works and what doesn’t. And that is the first bust stop to the land of professional talent marketing.
In this episode:
- What Google Analytics is?
- Why GA is an important tool for you as a talent marketer?
- How Google Analytics works?
- How to make GA useful?
- Ask GA questions, it will answer!
Episode-length: 33:38 min
Chris Mercer blog post: How does Google Analytics work, An easy guide for beginners >>
JOIN the waitlist for Talent Marketing School here >>
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