With so many options available to them, many recruiting firms just don’t know where to start when it comes to digital marketing. If you are in the recruiting and staffing industry and you’re not currently doing some sort of digital marketing, you’re behind. But now’s the time to start.
If you found this blog post organically, I’d be willing to bet that you are performing digital marketing and are trying to figure out how to attribute marketing dollars to what is working for your firm and what is not. Here are some key methods you can use to measure the effectiveness of your spending. Once you have the data, you can make informed decisions to allocate more money to the strategies that work.
Related Post: PPC Match Types For Recruiters ➢
Let’s Talk Tracking
If you’re not using a tracking system on your digital marketing activity, stop right now and go implement Google Analytics (GA) on your website. We’ll be looking at this platform and discussing URL tracking and specifically UTM, which are the tracking parameters GA uses.
Once you’ve implemented GA on your site, the next step is to figure out which digital marketing activities you are currently running: PPC, SEO, LinkedIn organic, LinkedIn ads, Facebook organic or Facebook ads. After your finalized digital strategies are running, put those to the side, we’ll come back to them later. Now, go to the Google URL campaign builder. This tool helps you create the proper URL parameters making it easier to monitor how your digital activity is doing.
UTM Codes and Naming Conventions
For example, let’s say your job link currently looks like this:
Company.com/job1234/job-title/
By appending a UTM tracking query to your URL, you allow GA to collect data. Here’s an example of a proper tracking URL you might add to the above job link:
?utm_source=linkedin&utm_medium=paid&utm_campaign=job123
The new tracking URL above says that you are using paid Cost per Click (CPC) to promote your job on LinkedIn. You can also put the name of the job in the “utm_campaign” section allowing you to easily reference the specific job.
Some other examples of naming conventions/parameters are:
- utm = google analytics tracking parameters
- ? = triggers the tracking query after the URL
- & = used to separate multiple variables in the query
- utm_source = (google, linkedIn, bing, facebook)
- utm_medium = (cpc, social, email, display)
- utm_campaign = (job123, spring_sale, salaryguide2019)
- utm_term = (cpc keyword)
- utm_content = (ad title, ad dimensions)
Not all UTM codes/parameters are needed and technically only the “utm_source” parameter is required.
Using these naming conventions, you can experiment to figure out what works best for you and your firm. The one thing I want to stress is staying consistent with your naming as well as ALWAYS using lowercase naming conventions. Lowercase naming conventions help keep your data clean, making it easier in GA to gather and read the data.
For instance, if you create a lowercase name and later write the same name with uppercase letters mixed in, Google registers these as two unique tags. This will split your traffic between the lowercase source and then uppercase source. Here is an example:
Let’s say you are tracking all your “Newsletter” traffic. If every other month you are using a capital “N”, you’ll notice in your google analytics reports that half your traffic is coming from the source “Newsletter,” and the other half is coming from “newsletter.”
Related Post: How Your Recruiting Firm Should Approach Competitor Negative Keywords ➢
Channel Groupings
Now back to the list you created of your digital marketing activities. Using the previous information, you can create URL tracking parameters that are consistent and match your digital marketing activities. Your data will tell the person looking at the data who, what, and where traffic is coming from. Having the proper data shown in GA allows you to see exactly where your candidates or clients are coming from.
Example of Channel Groupings in Google Analytics:
Key Takeaways
1. Poorly executed UTM tracking can lead to inaccurate and messy data
2. Always use lowercase UTM parameters
3. Be consistent with your naming
4. If you have a lot of UTM’s to build, do it in Excel