Recruitment Marketing Metrics That Matter
Launching a marketing campaign can be an exhilarating moment as you watch your creative baby head out into the world.
And while we can get caught up in initial indicators of success from the number of shares and follows to website visits, our interest tends to wane over time. As a result, we lose track of whether the spend was worth it or not. And before we know it, we’re back to screening candidates and filling roles, without really thinking how people found us in the first place.
In a previous blog, we talked through the key factors to consider when setting an annual recruitment marketing budget so you can see a solid return on your investment.
But how do you actually track and measure that ROI? In this blog, we talk through different recruitment marketing metrics that help you decide if your campaign worked (or not).
Why Are Marketing Metrics Important?
We live in a world where we measure everything from the number of ‘likes’ on our personal Instagram posts to our recruitment consultants’ KPIs. So why should marketing activity be any different?
Yes, at the end of the FY you can look at your overall number of placements, financials including revenue and profit growth and review the number of clients gained and lost. But how has your marketing spend contributed to the overall growth of your business?
Marketing metrics, when reported regularly and accurately, can not only help you optimise every dollar/pound spent, but also measure your ROI and create a case for increased future spend. If you can attribute your increased revenue or new client roster to a particular campaign, you might have a case for greater investment in your budget and/or team.
At a campaign or even tactical level, marketing metrics can also help to inform future decision-making. That might include the channel mix used to target specific audience groups or the timing of certain activities that will get you the biggest bang for your buck.
Not All Metrics are Made Equal
It can be easy to be swept up in the excitement of watching your LinkedIn following grow or hitting a certain number of impressions on your Facebook ad. But it’s important to remember why you’ve invested money into marketing activity in the first place.
In an earlier blog, we talked about the importance of setting clear, measurable objectives. Note the word ‘measurable’! These targets are ultimately how you know if your activity has been a good investment or if it needs tweaking in the future.
For example, you might gain lots of new social media followers as a result of your fun new TikTok campaign. But what if your objective was to drive traffic to your website and get people to register for an event? The activity might have increased brand awareness, but maybe you didn’t achieve what you set out to with the campaign.
The ultimate marketing metric is Cost Per Acquisition or in recruitment terms Cost Per Placed Lead which refers to all the money spent on securing a new client who you were then able to successfully place a candidate for. This metric is generally used at the end of the financial year to decide how the entire marketing budget, or a specific sub-campaign, fared.
It’s calculated as follows:
Cost Per Acquisition (Placed Lead) = Campaign Cost/Number of conversions
Other Important Metrics
While Cost Per Acquisition measures success at a macro level, there are plenty of other ways to evaluate smaller campaigns or specific channels.
Paid Marketing Metrics
Think of any form of online advertising you include in your campaign from PPC (pay per click) to online display ads. Who saw them, on what websites, using which search terms and what action did they take as a result?
Key paid marketing metrics include:
- Click-Through Rates (CTR)
- Conversion metrics linked to the campaign objective e.g. a client downloading a Salary Survey or a candidate registering their CV
- Cost Per Lead (CPL)
- Customer Lifetime Value (CLV)
Website Metrics
The data you collect on your website traffic can help evaluate your SEO strategy and identify areas of the website that may not be particularly user-friendly. It will also show you where people are spending most of their time.
Key website metrics include:
- Website visits – the number of times the website was visited
- Bounce rate – how many people leave a website after only visiting one page
- Page views – the number of times a particular page is viewed
- Session duration - the amount of time spent on the website
Social Media Metrics
When Instagram trialled the removal of likes back in 2019, it caused an uproar. Why? Because users wanted other people, and more importantly brands, to see how popular they were.
Social media activity can be used to evaluate a brand’s influence and following, even when using professional platforms like LinkedIn.
The main social media metrics include:
- Engagement Likes / comments / shares / retweets / @mentions
- Number of followers/subscribers
- Click Through Rates
- Reach – the potential number of unique viewers a post could have
- Impressions – how often a post appears
- Referrals to your website
- Conversion rate
- Share of voice – listening software can track volume and sentiment
Email Marketing Metrics
It’s reassuring to know that when you send your EDM out into the world, you can track exactly where it goes and what recipients do with it.
Email marketing is a relatively low-cost, high-impact channel if done correctly and can help drive new candidates and employers as well as engage existing clients.
Key email marketing metrics include:
- Open rate
- Click-through rate
- Conversion rate
- Forwarding rate
- New subscribers
- Bounce rate – number of times the email was returned by the recipient’s server
- Unsubscribes
- Spam complaints
Recruitment Marketing Tip #4: Don’t Skimp on Advertising
Most recruitment agencies have become good at generating their own content, from quick social posts of team outings to larger industry-wide reports. The next challenge to overcome is that marketing is no longer free. Go back five years and this was not the case; the commercialisation of social media was still in its relative infancy. This meant a single post on social media would often reach hundreds if not thousands of people in Sydney, Melbourne or Brisbane, enabling a brand to be built with very little cost.
These days, there is significantly more competition on social media platforms, so to have true impact, you have to be prepared to spend. An annual advertising budget may include offline advertising, but should definitely include paid advertising on the likes of Google, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn and potentially new channels such as Snapchat (depending on the market).
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