Having a business strategy is pointless without setting clear KPIs. The same goes for marketing. If you have no measurable milestones that will support the business strategy (and indeed has informed the business strategy) then the business cannot pull in the same direction and marketing will have no measure of success. So why wouldn’t you want to get to grips with setting up goals on Google Analytics – regardless of whatever other tools you use, Google will remain the one point of truth. And it’s free!
So what are these goals? Essentially, there are four main types of goals in Google Analytics:
Destination
Duration
Pages/screens per session
Event
Now if you consider your KPIs such as ‘we need X number of candidates registered this month,’ you can merge your KPIs with your Google Analytics goals. You can create up to 20 goals within your account, so it’s best to set broad goals.
For example, instead of a goal being ‘number of visitors who applied for the job advertisement for a kitchen porter,’ have something more general like ‘number of visitors who applied for a job within the hospitality sector in June.’
Now it’s time to consider what goals are essential for recruiters. It’s easy enough to take advantage of all goal types to ensure you’re getting the most accurate results for your KPIs.
Destination
A destination is a goal type centered around whether your visitors are landing on a certain page.
This could be as simple as a goal for when visitors land on a ‘Thank you for uploading your CV’ landing page. You could go more in-depth with the destination type to analyse how many of your visitors are viewing the blogs/resources sections of your website.
Duration
Duration focuses on how long a visitor stays on a specific page. This type of goal is mainly used to measure engagement. Say, for example, you publish new content regarding interview hints and tips. You may want to see the average time that visitors spend reading it which helps evaluate whether your content has been valuable.
Pages/screens per session
Tracking this information is important to show how many relevant job ads you have for prospects. You could set up a goal along the lines of ‘Pages visited greater than 5’ then measure this to understand the correlation of the jobs you are advertising and the candidates that are landing on your site.
Event
Perhaps the most relevant goal type for recruiters is an event. The only difference is that, to set up an event, there is an external process separate to Google Analytics such as creating a form or a widget. The most common event goal to use for recruitment is a registration/application.
Your Google Analytics event goals are likely to succeed where your KPIs become more aligned as opposed to more abstract and interpretative such as changing your campaigns due to the duration spent on certain pages. However, all types of goals are equally as important; without tailoring the right content for your visitors, you may not get the event goals you’re looking for.
If you’re new to Google Analytics in recruitment, then best practice would be to strike a good balance of types of goal, to see which most affect your website’s performance, get a good ratio of each type of goal to accurately measure how successfully your website is performing.
For more information on this topic, download Volcanic’s eBook on ‘Why Recruiters should be using Google Analytics’.