How Recruiters Can Use Google Analytics to Optimize Their Website

How Recruiters Can Use Google Analytics to Optimize Their Website

No one can deny it, recruitment is becoming more of a digital affair, and this is a good thing. Though some people fear the data age, those who don’t embrace it will undoubtedly fall behind.

Google Analytics is an awesome tool for helping us understand how visitors came to be on our website and how they behave when they are there. We can then analyse this data to work out where we are doing well and where we can improve.

What you should be looking for

When you dive deep into the data there seems to be a near limitless amount of insight to be attained with Google Analytics. I personally am a pure data geek and can spend all day digging around the analytics of a busy website but we don’t all have time for that, so here are the two few key things you should be looking at…

Where visitors are coming from

Probably, if not definitely the first thing you want to be checking is how people are being delivered to your website. If you have been spending a bit of money on SEO for example, then you should expect to see an increase in organic search traffic.

Same goes for social media. If you have been spending a fair amount of effort and/or money on social media marketing, whether it be paid or organic, you will want to see an increase in this traffic reflected in your analytics.

What people are doing on your site

How people are behaving on your site is critical to being able to find leaks in your application funnel. For example, if you have a three stage application form then you might be able to deduce that 30% of your visitors fill in the first stage, only 10% complete the second stage and 8% fill in the final stage. With this knowledge you can deduce that there is something on the second stage of the form that was throwing people off and causing them to scatter. Knowing this, you can investigate and address the issue to reduce people bouncing. This is called conversion optimization and is something you should always be doing.

You can even break down their behaviour into traffic sources, so you might see that while you are spending $500 per month on Facebook Ads, you are only getting several applications from there. While you might see that a blog article on your site has drawn a lot of traffic through a post shared on Twitter and a decent chunk of those visitors signed up as candidates. You can take action on this information and devote your resources to the most effective traffic sources, focusing on what works and abandoning what doesn’t. Being able to see which blog articles (independent of traffic source) do well at converting casual readers to clients or candidates can help you when crafting the next piece of content by helping you better understand what attracts and captivates your audience.

How to set up Google Analytics

While not overly complicated if you have access to your website’s backend, this is probably a job best left to your developer out of caution. Fortunately it will be a breeze for them. It’s not much more than some code that is put at the beginning of your website's header so that every page, when loaded, fires off data back to Google which they can interpret and attribute to visitors.

You will need to set up an account first to get your special code which you can do by heading to the Google Analytics website. Again, this might be a bit baffling so you may have to hit up your developer for this part.

And of course, if you are having any issues with getting Google Analytics to work on your website and need some assistance then shoot us a message and we would be happy to help.