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Google Analytics: A Guide for Staffing FirmsHARNESS THE POWER OF DATA TO MAKE SMART MARKETING AND RECRUITING DECISIONS.

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{DO YOU KNOW

WHO IS VISITING YOUR WEBSITE?

HOW THEY FOUND YOU? WHAT THEY DID

ON YOUR WEBSITE? WHY THEY DID (OR DIDN’T) CONVERT?

Your website is the most important tool to have in your arsenal. But if you’re not keeping tabs

on your website, you’re missing out.

If you want to run a profitable, rapidly growing staffing firm, you need to leverage data to evaluate and adjust

your company’s decisions.

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Google Analytics is a free website analytics software tool offered by Google. It is the most widely-used analytics system in the world and is recommended #1 to all staffing and recruiting firms for use on their websites and job boards.

ACCESSING THE DATADon’t know if your website has Google Analytics? Contact your webmaster. They should be able to assist you in either gaining access to your Google Analytics data or installing it on your website.

Once you have access to your Google Analytics data, take a close look at the following metrics to better understand your website’s performance and act on your new insights.

BUILDINGTHE

FOUNDATION

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BUILDING THE FOUNDATION

MANIPULATING THE DATAWhen evaluating traffic in Google Analytics, use their data comparison tools to benchmark your current results to previous time periods. Here’s what we suggest looking at:

COMPARE MONTH OVER MONTH TRAFFIC This will show you how your site performed compared to the last 30 days. By contin-ually measuring this you’ll be able to see overall trends. Just like the stock market, there will be peaks and valleys, but over time you want to see a consistent overall climb in traffic and visits.

COMPARE YEAR OVER YEAR TRAFFIC Only comparing traffic month to month can sometimes give you a false sense of security or scare the daylights out of you! That’s because staffing can be a seasonal business with wide traffic swings at different points throughout the year. For example, EVERY year traffic to staffing and recruiting websites plummets in November and December. Then we see a huge spike in traffic in January. So instead of focusing on just month to month, compare year over year too. Ideally, we want to see very nice, consistent growth over the previous year. Comparing the same months from the previous year will help you eliminate the seasonal or monthly fluctuations and give a true indication of how your traffic is trending.

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This report in Google Analytics provides you with a bird’s eye view of your website. This report details:

OVERALL WEBSITE TRAFFIC

NUMBER OF USERS Total number of people or devices that visited your site.

SESSIONS Total number of times your site was visited (this includes people who may have visited your site more than once!).

PAGES PER SESSION Average number of pages someone viewed while on your site. Note: if you have a single page or long-format website this number will be inaccurate as your visitors don’t leave the homepage, even if they pull up subpages.

AVERAGE SESSION DURATION Average time that each visitor spends on your website. Aim for a website duration of at least two minutes.

BOUNCE RATE Percentage of visitors who hit your homepage but immediately left without taking any action. Every website will have visitors bounce, but if the bounce rate is higher than 65%, it might indicate that user experience on the website needs improvement, or that you are gaining the wrong type of visitors.

NEW VS. RETURNING VISITORS This pie chart provides insights about the number of visitors who visited your website for the first time, versus people returning later. In the staffing industry, the average percentage of returning visitors ranges between 20-35%.

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AUDIENCE OVERVIEW

NEW VS. RETURNING VISITOR

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Where is traffic coming from?ACQUISITION

ORGANIC TRAFFIC Organic traffic are visitors who entered onto your website by clicking on an answer to a search query result on a search engine such as Google, Bing or Yahoo. Most visitors coming from organic sources have no brand familiar-ity and are looking for a company to meet their needs. The more (relevant) traffic you can get from organic search, the better!

The best way to grow traffic from organic is to implement aggressive on-going search engine optimization (SEO) strategies, including using a blog, a job board optimized for search engines and an ongoing SEO program. The more relevant content your staffing agency consistently adds to its web-site, the more engaging and educational users will find your website. That’s a huge benefit in the eyes of Google and other search engines.

Tracking how your site visitors come to your site reveals the activities that are adding value in your recruiting and

marketing mix, and those that are falling short. Traffic sources are listed under the ‘acquisition report’ and

will tell you how visitors came to your websites. Top traffic sources to evaluate include:

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ACQUISITION TOP CHANNELS

ACQUISITION OVERVIEW CHART

ACQUISITION OVERVIEW

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REFERRAL TRAFFIC REPORT

REFERRAL TRAFFIC MENU

REFERRAL TRAFFIC This report breaks out the number of visitors who access your website through third-party websites. Job aggregating websites (like JobFuel, Indeed, Glassdoor, etc.) are also detailed here for you to show how these visitors interact and engage with your website. If you are seeing low engagement rates from paid placements on these websites, consider changing your advertising strategy and using programmatic recruiting to spend smarter and get in front of the right candidates.

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SOCIAL TRAFFIC REPORT

SOCIAL TRAFFIC MENU

SOCIAL MEDIA TRAFFIC Social media can be an amazing marketing tool. But not all social platforms will drive the same results for your business. To take a close look at social media traffic, go to Acquisition > Social > Overview. Drill down into each network’s report to see other key insights, including: • Which social media networks drive engaged visitors (and which don’t!) • Which pages (URLs) visitors entered the website on • What jobs were most popular on social media

SOCIAL TRAFFIC BREAKDOWN

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What are the most popular pages on your website?

BEHAVIOR

What content drives awareness and what content drives action? What content gets and keeps people

on your website? To ensure you’re delivering relevant content that drives conversions on your website (such as

job descriptions or blog posts), determine which pages candidates and employers utilize most.

Under the ‘Overview’ dashboard in the Behavior tab you can see the most frequently visited pages. By default,

you’ll see “/” at the top of the list — this is your website homepage. But after that you will see what areas

of your site are most popular.

BEHAVIOR OVERVIEW MENU

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HERE ARE SOME KEY THINGS TO LOOK FOR: • Change your date range to a full year to see what content is most popular (and when!). • Identify which portions of your site get the highest pageviews and make sure those pages drive people to convert (i.e., ensure visitors can easily contact you or take action from that page).

• Identify blog posts or content that is the most popular, and write more on those topics!

BEHAVIOR OVERVIEW REPORT

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In a candidate market, your website shouldn’t drive job seekers away; it should have them reaching out to you! Unfortunately, if your site doesn’t have a strong

user experience, potential talent could be walking away. That’s why making sure your site content meets

the needs of your visitors is a must.

OPTIMIZING USER

EXPERIENCE

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HOW TO MEASURE USE EXPERIENCE Want to get an idea of how your UX holds up? Take a look at these items under Behavior > Site Content > All Pages: • PAGE PERFORMANCE: See which pages gather the most traffic versus which pages have the fewest visitors. Organize pages by the number of Pageviews to get an idea of what content has the greatest impact and where you should concentrate your content marketing strategy.

• BOUNCE RATE: Look for pages with a low bounce rate to track content that funnels users further into your site. If you notice high bounce rates on key pages, you may need stronger calls to action or more relevant copy.

• AVERAGE TIME ON PAGE: You want the amount of time visitors spend on each area of your site to be as high as possible. If this number averages less than one minute, you can improve user experience by adding more rich media content such as videos, slideshows and infographics.

USER EXPERIENCE

SITE CONTENT MARKETING

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GETSEARCHINGDoes your staffing company have a resource page

like a blog? You can complete a more detailed analysis of your blog posts by searching for the path of the

URL where that content lives. Visit Behavior > Site Content > All Pages

again to get started.

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ABOUT DETAILED SEARCH

On the right side of the data table is a smaller search bar. Here you’ll want to enter the path shared by your blog posts, for example, “/blog” or “/2018” if posts are classified by date. Entering this in the search box will provide metrics that match just that query (not the default results, which display all the pages on your site).

Similarly, you can narrow your search results for other pages by following these same steps. Search for the path after your website’s domain name to track the performance of these individual areas. From there, you can look more closely at metrics like pageviews, average time on page and bounce rate.

SEARCH BAR

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Are you a local staffing company that works in one specific market? Or, are you a regional firm looking to

compare traffic for different locations?

GEOGRAPHYAre you getting the right traffic

from the right locations?

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To track the geographic regions you are getting traffic from you can visit Audience > Geo > Location in Google Analytics. Here’s what to look at: • What countries are driving traffic. If you’re not an international business and more than 10% of your traffic is coming from overseas, you need to dig deeper.

• Drill down by city to identify if the markets you serve are generating traffic.

• Compare month to month and year to year to look for traffic changes in different cities.

• If you have several offices in different cities, identify your top performers and compare marketing tactics in those offices to identify what worked best.

GEO REPORT

GEO MENUGEO MAP

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Is your site up to the challenge?MOBILE

In today’s job market, if someone is looking for a job they reach for their mobile device. Your website and career

portal’s experience on mobile can be the difference between having a steady flow of candidates, or only an infrequent trickle of candidates.

To see visitors’ mobile usage in Google Analytics, go to Audience > Mobile > Overview. Take a close look at each device type’s usage stats. See a high bounce rate and low number of average pages per session? It could indicate that there is a digital roadblock keeping visitors from engaging with or converting on your website. Average session duration on mobile might be a little lower than desktop traffic, but we don’t want to see a significant difference here!

MOBILE MENU

MOBILE REPORT

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DOES YOUR SITE CONVERT?

Getting employer inquiries and candidate applications are the goals behind most marketing or recruiting efforts. But if your website isn’t converting, you’re going to miss your goals. Use Google Analytics to

identify if people are converting and what traffic source drove those conversions.

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SOURCE MEDIUM REPORT

Access this information under Behavior > Site Content > All Pages. Once loaded, use the search bar below the graph to search for the conversion success pages, such as your job board “thank you” page. From there, expand the report by clicking on Secondary Dimension and selecting Source/Medium.

The source will tell you the platform the traffic came from, like Facebook or Google. The medium refers to the category of the source, or how users were sent to your site from the source. This includes organic, direct, email, social and PPC traffic.

This detailed report will help you identify if a particular source and marketing tactic is responsible for driving the most conversions on your most important pages.

SECONDARY DIMENSION

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If you want to take your conversion tracking to the next level, setting up goals in Google Analytics will mark specific actions clients and candidates take on your site

as conversions. Better yet, you can customize the exact conversions you want to track, such as the number

of candidates who completed a job application or the amount of time they stayed on your job board.

GOALSHow Do You Measure Success?

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SETTING UP GOALS To set up your first goal, go to Admin > View > Goals > New Goal. From here, you can create a goal that matches one of the following types: • DESTINATION: a visit to a specific web page URL.

• DURATION: a session that lasts a certain amount of time.

• PAGES/SCREENS PER SESSION: the number of pages someone visits before they leave your site.

• EVENT: actions including form completions, video plays and clicks on outbound links.

After your goal is saved, you can track the results by going to Conversions > Goals > Overview. Pay attention to the number of goal completions and the goal conversion rate to measure your success.

GOAL METRICS

TRACK CONVERSIONSCREATE GOALS

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www.haleymarketing.com/ideaclub

Haley Marketing is 100% focused on the staffing industry. We can help you interpret data to provide actionable

marketing and recruiting takeaways.

For more information on our marketing solutions, please contact us today.

NEED HELP PUTTING YOUR WEBSITE DATA

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