Have you ever wondered how many candidates come to your site, look at your search jobs, and apply to your jobs? Have you wondered how many don’t apply? Have you ever wondered where your clients go on your site and what they seem to find interesting? Want to learn more about your audience? Google Analytics (GA) – a tool you’ve likely heard of but haven’t spent much time delving into. A tool that is so cumbersome, that it has been notoriously intimidating to even attempt to master. But, luckily for you, we’re here to break it down so you are equipped with the knowhow to drive results for your staffing firm using GA.

First off, in a previous blog post, we highlighted the importance of implementing Google Analytics on your site…did you? If not, we’re here to remind you again. Information is power, right? Up your game and take the power! GA is a tool that helps you and your staffing firm make better decisions by helping you organize, understand, and analyze your site’s data, which results in an enhanced digital strategy, and ultimately, improved ROI. It’s time to make you an expert!

Google Analytics Structure
So, where do you even begin? First, you want to understand the basic structure of GA. This includes:

  • Organization – this level represents your overall company
  • Account(s) – this level contains just one or multiple accounts for a company, depending on your case. You are able to divide accounts by subdivisions or have one overarching account. Each account holds up to 50 properties.
  • Property – a property is a site or app and allows up to 25 views.
  • View – you must have at least two views per property. These include a raw version, and a filtered version which excludes traffic from your company.

Dimensions and Metrics
Now that you understand the setup, let’s get into dimensions and metrics. Dimensions are categories that include things like your landing page, or the device a user is using, while metrics are things you are able to track, like conversions or session duration. These are included in every Google Analytics report. Additionally, you are able to create custom dimensions and metrics to get more granular in seeing the behavior certain users took on your site.

Audiences
This leads us to audiences – a group of users that share similarities. An audience could be made up of age, location, etc. Google Analytics sets these types of audiences up for you; however, you’re also able to set up custom audiences that combine certain characteristics that you’d like to target. For example, you could create a custom audience of women aged 30-45 in the Greater Boston area.

Reporting
The meat and potatoes of GA! There are various reports Google Analytics offers:

  • Real-Time – this report allows you to view traffic on your site in, (shockingly), real time! You’re able to see where these users are coming from, which pages they’re on, their location, and more. This gives you a sense of the content/pages that are driving the most engagement, what social outlets are driving the most traffic, as well as your most popular geographies.

  • Audience – as a staffing firm, you know that relationship building and maintaining is of high importance. In this report, you are able to see how many users visited your site in the past 1, 7, 14, or 28 days. This is valuable to see if you have more one-day users than longer-term ones, which highlights a retention issue. Here, you see if people are not returning to your site which allows you to come up with a plan of action on how to make users crave that second encounter with your brand. Additionally, look into their demographics, interests, and devices. Are more people coming from mobile than desktop? Update your site to be more mobile-friendly!

  • Lifetime Value – do you want to know how valuable users are to your company? Look no further than GA’s lifetime value report (within audience reports), which allows you to adjust a time frame and see which users came from which media channels, thus allowing you to determine which outlets you should spend more or less of your efforts on.
  • Cohort – there is one “cohort type” as of now – “Acquisition Date” which allows you to see the first day a user went to your site. You are able to choose the size of this cohort (day, week, month), the metric you want to track, retention, and total number of sessions generated.

  • Acquisition – this report groups your traffic by source: organic, direct, referral, email, paid search, social, display, affiliate and other. Here you’ll see the landing pages, source, or keywords that brought these users to your site. This also helps you determine which of your efforts are performing well, or not as much.

  • Behavior – we always want to dive into why people are doing what they’re doing. This report is beneficial for you to see the most viewed URLs, as well as trends in total traffic. It even allows you to compare time frames and view how one month is performing versus another, or year-over-year data. This is helpful for you to pinpoint which pages drove the least amount of traffic, thus highlighting where you need to spend more time making those pages valuable to users. You’re also able to see which pages a user last landed on before bouncing from your site, as well as which pages drove the most actions. It is always helpful to know which of your website pages are generating high engagement, as well as low so you’re able to adjust accordingly.

  • Conversions – you want action to be taken! How do you track it? Pull a conversion report – this allows you to see who has signed up for a webinar, who has clicked to chat with a recruiter, or clicked “apply for job” on any of your various job postings. Define your conversions by:
    • Destination – when a user reaches a certain page
    • Event – e.g.: a click on a button
    • Duration – when a user stays on the page for more than a specific time frame
    • Pages/screens per session – when a user views a certain number of pages

Simple enough, right? Using Google Analytics to gather and understand key data points helps you identify any weak points, as well as areas in which you’re finding success. And, hey, if you still don’t feel like an expert, we’re only a click or call away!

business and marketing strategy

About S.J.Hemley Marketing
S.J.Hemley Marketing is a marketing and sales consulting firm focused on driving tangible results for professional services firms. Brand matters, but not without ROI. With over 20 years of sales and marketing experience within staffing and recruiting, we have helped to drive successful branding, sales training, lead generation activities as well as defining marketing strategy for top organizations. www.sjhemleymarketing.com

Sources:

https://www.haleymarketing.com/2018/07/03/6-google-analytics-metrics-every-staffing-company-should-track/
https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/google-analytics