An Insight Into Google Analytics.
Introduction
‘Google Analytics Unwrapped’ was a Christmas special webinar of sorts. Recruitment has been an area of focus for many businesses over the previous year as the UK saw a high labour shortage nationwide. Recruitment will only become more prominent in January, as one in five people tend to look for new jobs in the new year. Our experts wanted to share some information, thoughts, and guidance to the most of Google Analytics if you are an employer or a recruitment agency.
This webinar was hosted by Martin Hughes, Technical and PPC expert, and Sam Jones, SEO expert. With more than 10 years of experience in the industry between them, they are specialists in data-driven campaigns based on insight and analysis.
Identifying your Traffic and its Behaviour
Why is this important?
Take a look at your paid activity, including email marketing, SEO, social media, PPC and Programmatic. Employers and recruitment agencies investing in digital need to assess how well their investment is performing. By using Google Analytics and other software, you can get your questions answered, including:
- Is the traffic you are buying taking the actions you hoped it would?
- How do you differentiate campaigns within the same platform?
- How do you identify the traffic you are not seeing?
- How are visitors responding to and engaging with your website?
To begin, We Will Start with a Couple of Basic Elements
The standard interface is where you should go to start analysing elements. The first place to go in Google Analytics is ‘acquisition,’ ‘all traffic,’ then, ‘source/medium.’ Source is pretty straightforward. By looking at this data, you can find relevant information that could help boost your campaigns, such as key metrics, users, new users, and sessions. Keep a close eye on bounce rate, meaning when somebody lands on a webpage and then exits without taking any meaningful action on the page.
The second layer of this process is not actually within Google Analytics but within your Search Console data. This will tell you your total clicks, impressions, the average click-through rate, and the average position. When you look at your Analytics data, you are simply getting your landing page data. It is wise to look at accompanying metrics alongside landing page data. These metrics will tell you how your site is organically presented to people. Integrating your landing page data allows you to identify potential roadblocks in your traffic or page performance.
Analytics & Social Traffic
Google Analytics is known to be quite a hostile environment. It can be challenging to find campaign data, and sometimes Analytics can point you in the wrong direction.
There are ways around this.
You need to add some tracking elements to your social adverts for Google Analytics to pick them up with greater accuracy. https://ga-dev-tools.web.app/campaign-url-builder/ is the website to use for all of your social advertisements. You can have all of your Adwords and social campaigns within one report on Google Analytics. To find this, you go to ‘acquisition,’ then to ‘campaigns,’ then to ‘all campaigns,’ and then you will have a breakdown of whatever platform you have used. This data is impossible to analyse if you do not apply these tracking tags to your adverts and emails. For any non-Google marketing and hyperlinking, tag these URLs.
Setting Up Goals and Events
Setting up tracking on your website lets you see the impact of campaign activity and improve website and marketing performance, ultimately delivering more clients and candidates for your business.
Several simple and effective Goals can be set up, including form submissions, file downloads, CV uploads, and email button clicks.
We expect to see CV Upload, free CV review, account review, and candidate registration in an employer/recruiter goal set. Candidate registration is a valuable goal as you can build audiences from people who have reached that page but did not register.
Conversion Funnels
Conversion funnels are great for tracking multi-page journeys and seeing where visitors drop out. You can then make changes to the process on the website, making it more effective at delivering the results you require.
We had a previous client with an extensive application form of around seven to ten pages. To tackle this, we set up a funnel with the desired destination as ‘thank-you’ – the last page of the application form. We then looked at our conversion funnels in Google Analytics to see where people were dropping off. This process is extremely useful for clients with multi-page sequences. People’s patience is limited, so the shorter the process, the more likely you will get the outcome you require.
Segmenting your Audiences
Gaining insights into your traffic is an important element of successful websites and digital campaigns.
Setting up audiences in Google Analytics is a straightforward process. You can find them in the ‘admin’ panel, then ‘Audiences,’ and if you have not previously set any audiences up, you will be prompted to set up your first ‘all users’ audience.
We would advise setting up multiple audiences to cover visitors who complete various goals, users who reach a certain stage of your funnel, and previous customers. All of the mentioned can be configured within this section. When you are running very specific campaigns, it is very useful to make sure you are talking to your audiences correctly by tracking data. You can compare the performance of one campaign with another to see where you could improve in terms of tone of voice, content, copy, and structure. All these nuances can make a huge difference to the type of results you are getting.
Measuring Success
Once tracking is in place, goals are set up, audiences are defined, and a robust tracking framework is in place, you can truly analyse how your campaigns are performing. This means you can now make informed decisions on how to evolve your websites and digital marketing efforts in ways that will deliver real performance improvements. You can configure Analytics to focus on what success looks like for your business and keep those incremental gains coming in.
Analytics is a hub that allows you to improve everything. It is the centre point for your performance.
How Crunch Can Help
We have a range of successful recruitment case studies available to view on our website, so take a moment to check them out and see for yourself the results we could achieve when we work together.
Is your organisation interested in what Crunch has to offer? Get in touch today for a free chat.