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What to Track – How to Measure the Success of Your Online Marketing (part 1 of 3)

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Big data. Analytics. Tracking. Analysis.

It’s everywhere. From the board room to the football field, data analysis is changing how we live our day to day lives. But data analysis isn’t a new concept—it just continues to evolve.

In this series of posts, I’ll explain the importance of marketing metrics for staffing companies, as well as which elements in Google Analytics (your most helpful analysis tool for your website) might be the most beneficial.

So what marketing metrics are most important to staffing companies?

To be an effective marketer, you need the proper tools, technology and processes in place to make sure your marketing dollars are producing ROI.

At Haley Marketing, we install Google Analytics on every website we build. Today, we track data on over 500 staffing and recruiting websites – pooling together the world’s largest collection of staffing and recruiting company website data. Our team uses this data to help analyze which marketing strategies and tactics work—and which don’t. We continually look for trends in traffic growth or decline, changes in traffic sources, visitor behavior and more. This information is then used to refine our marketing efforts to produce more ROI.

In this article we are going to dig into two specific metrics you should measure consistently, and the ones our clients are always most eager to examine:  overall website traffic and visitor behavior.

Overall website traffic.

When first logging into Google Analytics, you’ll be able to view overall traffic to your website over the last 30 days by default. This will provide an overview of where things stand. But, to put this data into context you need a comparison. Here’s what we suggest:

Compare Month over Month Traffic
This will show you how your site performed compared to the last 30 days. By continually 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/monthly fluctuations and give a true indication of how your traffic is trending.

Watch Our How-To Video on Analyzing Overall Website Traffic

Behavior – What are the Most Popular Pages of Your Site?

To be an effective online marketer, you need to understand what content matters to your audience. What content drives awareness and what content drives action? What content is getting and keeping people on your website?

To track this in Google Analytics click on Behavior>Overview. This will give the top ten most visited pages of your site and allow you to view a full report. 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. Here are some tips on using this data:

  • Change your date range to a full year to see what content is most popular.
  • Identify what areas of your site get the highest pageviews and make sure those pages lead people to convert (i.e. ensure they can easily contact you or take action from that page).
  • Identify blog posts or content that is the most popular – write more on those topics!

Watch Our How-To Video on Analyzing Visitor Behavior

Up Next:  What about my audience?  Find out how your audience gets to your site and where they come from.

My next installment will help you dig further into Google Analytics and find out about acquisition, audience geography and how your applicants find your jobs.

Don’t have time to wait for the next post to publish?  Download the Idea Club article, “How staffing companies measure marketing success” now!

 

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Get our best marketing tips—one idea a week. You’ll also get invites to our webinars, and exclusive offers on our products and services.

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