Just because you have the tools available to measure a particular recruitment marketing metric, doesn’t always mean you should do it. The problem is, there are so many metrics available to us but not all of them show a real return – so how do we know which are actually worth our time?
In marketing, ‘more’ doesn’t always mean ‘better’, and with only so many hours in the day (particularly in recruitment!), it’s important to focus your time on the metrics that matter in terms of ROI (return on investment).
So, here’s a list of the recruitment marketing metrics that you should stop fussing over and the ones to focus on instead.
1. Social media followers
Don’t get me wrong – as marketers, we all know having a large number of followers and likes looks (and feels) great. But how many of these followers are actually engaging with your content? And how many of them are converting to valuable traffic to your website?
Followers and likes often give us quite a distorted picture. Sure, you might have 1,000 followers on Twitter, but if 400 of those are spam accounts and only five actually engage with your content, you shouldn’t really be celebrating. It might sound a bit cliché, but ‘quality over quantity’ should be your social media metric mantra!
Measure clicks, engagement, shares or impressions instead (if impressions are high, this is normally an indicator that your content is being shared out and reaching a wider readership). These metrics will give you clearer insights into which kinds of content work best for your audience, so you can plan your future social media content accordingly.
2.Email open rates
Email open rates are important to an extent: They give us a general overview of the effectiveness of our email subject lines and also offer some insight into the best days and times that are most effective for sending emails out. But the purpose of an email is not for it to be opened, but for the recipient to click through to the next stage (normally your website). So if your candidates and clients are opening but not clicking through (or worse still – opening just so they can unsubscribe), you can’t really make a song and dance about it.
Again, what really matters here is engagement, so a good start would be to focus on your click-through rates instead. Click-throughs are a much better indicator of how successful an email campaign has been, as they tell you whether the content was enticing enough to make the reader want to click through to your website. It also means that your CTA (call-to-action) is working and that you’re engaging the right audience. So whilst you should keep tracking your email open rates, don’t fuss over them or rely on these alone.
3. Blog page views
If you’re running a blog on your recruitment website (if not, you should be!), it’s easy to obsess over blog views as these give us a great ego boost. But whilst blog views can indicate that your content is good and providing value (or at least that your blog titles are interesting enough to pull readers onto the page) think about what you’re ultimately trying to achieve by blogging in the first place. I’m sure it’s more than just getting candidates to read your content!
Therefore, it would be a better idea to track how many new contacts your blog posts are bringing into your database (so how many new subscribers your receive from a page) or re-engaging those who are already on it. At the end of the day, your blog is there to pull in readers that will eventually become placements, so any figures that indicate you’re moving in the right direction are more valuable to you.
4. Bounce rates
Bounce rate is the percentage of people who visit your website but leave after viewing only one page. Anything above 70% is considered unsatisfactory as it’s thought that this is a sign that you’re not providing enough value. However, it all really depends on the context of the bounces.
For example, if your aim was to pull a candidate onto a page and you did just that, they managed to find everything they were looking for on that page and then left your website satisfied – would that be such a bad thing? Having a low bounce rate could just as easily indicate that the candidate couldn’t find what they were looking for so were forced to browse your website pages further until they had success.
Relying too heavily on your bounce rate could lead you to draw false conclusions and distract you from other, often more valuable insights. Continue to track the bounce rate if you’ve personally found it useful in the past, but you’ll gain more valuable insights from tracking things like page views-to-conversions (the percentage of those who read a job page and then click the ‘apply’ button) as this will tell you if your job ads are compelling enough to make a candidate want to apply.
Recruitment marketing metrics are always important to measure, but tracking something just because it looks good on paper wastes valuable time! It’s much more important to focus on metrics that you actually understand, and that lead you to make decisions that are likely to have a positive impact on your recruitment marketing strategy.
Understanding the real value of recruitment marketing metrics is all down to one crucial hire - your Recruitment Marketer. Finding the right candidate for the job isn't easy, and something that many businesses get wrong. Which is why we've created a job description template for you to download!
