One of the key measures of how strong your online brand is, is the volume of RELEVANT website visitors it receives.
It doesn’t matter if you have the flashiest, best looking website in your region or even country, if you don’t have enough people seeing it, the design means nothing.
The higher the number of visitors, the greater the volume of job applications, client vacancy requests and even recruiters applying to work for you will be.
Obviously, there are other metrics you should pay attention to, but knowing your website Sessions and Users, and how this compares to industry averages is a very good starting place.
Finding Industry Averages
So, what are industry average website traffic numbers? Well, there is no easy answer to this because every business is different and there is definitely no publicly available data on the subject (we recruiters are a private bunch!). With many recruitment clients throughout Australia and New Zealand we are probably the best place organisation to access and provide some insight on this subject.
Comparative data is best broken down by the number of recruiters working for the agency, which is a good indicator of size. As well as size, we’ve split the data into clients with active marketing programs and those that are typical of the average recruitment agency.
We’ve included Sessions and Users as these are both helpful numbers to know. Sessions is all visits to your website, Users are the total number of unique visitors to your website.
Other Success Metrics
Other statistics you should keep a close eye on include; the amount of time the visitors spend on your recruitment website (Time on Site) and Bounce Rate (Time on Site is the better metric). The longer the time, the more content the user is digesting and the greater affinity they will have with your brand. One word of caution, if your application process is not streamlined, significant time on site could elude to a poor candidate experience.
Also, keep track of how many people come from specific sources, for example Google, Direct, LinkedIn, Indeed etc. Trends here can tell you a lot about your audience and the success or otherwise of your SEO or marketing.
Once a person reaches your site the last two things that you need to know are where they go and whether they complete any actions or goals. It’s here where it is very important to have clear calls to action for all of your audiences; clients, candidates and recruiters (if you’re trying to attract them). Do people apply for jobs, they sign-up to newsletters, download salary guides or register jobs? The tools are there to measure this activity but there is a murky area where data is lost. This is usually in the form of a third party job application tool or the user logically choosing to phone your agency rather than complete an online form. So set up Goals and track User Paths, but also pay attention internally to the volumes of candidates and cold client calls that come through.
True Analysis
The last thing to remember when it comes to website traffic is that we work in a seasonal business, some agencies have more traffic at Christmas, others significantly less, some boom in election year, and others don’t. The only way to paint a really accurate picture for your recruitment agency is to actively track your results over a sustained period of time. When we on-board a new client, we try to record historic website and social analytics for at least six months. We then enter new data every month. You can try (and we have) all sorts of flashy tools, or to export countless documents from Google Analytics, but the best way is to simply manually record them each month. It takes around 10 minutes.
