Recruiting Session 9:

Hey guys, it’s Matt, and this Session is all about switching on the lights. In recent videos, we’ve focused on how to make your job ads look great and how to get them seen by choosing a wide mix of placements. And we certainly need to do both of those things to advertise effectively.

But the only earthly way of knowing if we have the right ads in the right places is to shine a light on their actual results. So over the next two Sessions, we’re going to look at six tools and techniques that will switch on the lights and show us whether our efforts and dollars are getting a good return or just going down the tubes.

Before examining these specific tools and techniques, let’s take a look at a flow chart of our job advertising and application process. This will give us a better grasp of what we’ll illuminate along the way.

So here’s the chart. Pretty simple. It starts with our ads which fall into those two broad categories we discussed previously–ONLINE options like search ads, aggregators, and job boards. And traditional options like TV, radio, and print.

Though your ads for any particular job or promotional campaign can show up in all these different places, they should take people to a single location. And that’s a dedicated landing page that speaks directly to drivers about the job and lets them either:

• fill out a full application in your Applicant Tracking System
• contact your recruiters by calling or filling out a lead form.

So that’s the process, and it’s important to recognize that both your results and your ability to see them depend on it. They especially depend on what’s right at the center of the process–your landing pages. Our past Sessions have already made the case for landing pages, but I want to emphasize their central role in achieving and tracking results.

In terms of effectiveness, we know people are more likely to act when ads take them to a landing page with a matching, but more thorough message and a clear call to action.

Landing pages can also make your ads more effective by letting you connect with more of the people who see them. The main way to accomplish this is through a lead form. It gives drivers a convenient way to tell you they’ve viewed and are interested in your opportunity, but aren’t ready to apply until discussing it further with you.

This is why it’s best to direct all your ads to landing pages – even when those ads are in places like job boards where you could send someone straight from the job posting to a full application. If you do that, you miss out on some of those advantages landing pages offer.

But you also miss out on some ways to see and measure results. Sending someone to a landing page lets us capture information about which ad source they came from and whether the combined messages of the ad and the page led them to apply. That gives you valuable insights into which ads are working and which aren’t.

With that, let’s start looking at those six tools and techniques for switching on the lights. The first of these is a web analytics tool. It illuminates the performance of your landing pages.

Unlike that poor kid, a web analytics software will tell you how many visitors are really coming to your landing pages. Web analytics is also a foundational technology which several of the other tools and techniques need in order to work, but even by itself, the tool illuminates two main things.

The first is your PAGE TRAFFIC, which is simply how many people are visiting and from where. On its own, web analytics can’t show you which ads are driving traffic to a page. But it still provides basic insights like which site they were on before coming to yours or if they arrived directly, meaning they either typed your web address right into their browser or clicked a direct link somewhere, like in an email or newsletter.

The second thing web analytics illuminates is PAGE ACTIVITY. That includes what people clicked on or interacted with while on the site and how long they stayed. So this shows what’s getting the most attention. And it also shows your bounce rate, which is how frequently someone arrives, but then quickly leaves. If your bounce rate is high, then people either don’t like what they see, or they were expecting something different. Either way, you know you need to make some changes.

So that’s what a web analytics tool does, but how do you select one and set it up? Well, the good news is you probably don’t have to because it’s probably already been done. If you’re not sure, just ask whomever manages your websites, whether that’s your internal IT department or an external partner. Chances are, they’ve already integrated web analytics into your sites. It’s just standard procedure these days, so you should be able to start receiving reports on page activity right away.

However, in the unlikely event that you discover your web team isn’t using analytics, well, just turn off the video and call me now.

But seriously, there’s no reason for your company not to use web analytics. There are dozens of good, affordable tools, and the most popular and affordable of them all is...you guessed it, Google Analytics. When I say affordable, I mean free. So if your company uses nothing else, you should at least implement Google Analytics. Besides being free, it’s relatively simple to set up and use. And it can also integrate right into Adwords, which makes it easy to track the results of any ads you run in Google’s networks.

But then again, you don’t have to use Google Analytics to do that. Any web analytics tool can track the performance of your advertisements. But doing that requires an additional technique, and it’s our second way to switch on the lights. We can illuminate which online ads are driving traffic to our pages by using something called URL tags.

A clothing tag tells you which manufacturer your shirt or pants came from. And similarly, a URL tag tells you which ad your site visitors came from. In a really simplified, conceptual way, here’s how this works:

You place an ad somewhere online. It doesn’t matter where. (Okay, actually it does matter, but just not in this illustration.) Anyway, wherever you place the ad, you include a url, which is simply the address of the landing page you’re linking to. And in that URL, you add one or more tags. These are simply little codes to indicate which ad has that particular link. When someone follows the url link from the ad to your landing page, your web analytics tool captures the tags, so you can see exactly which ad brought the visitor to your page.

It’s that simple... at least, from a conceptual standpoint. Of course, from a technical standpoint, it’s a heck of a lot more complex, so let’s slip on our nerd glasses for just a few minutes to magnify some of the more techy aspects of tags.

A good way to do this is to look at the most widely used kind. They’re called UTM tags, which stands for Urchin Tracking Module. Yeah, that’s right, urchin. But not this kind of urchin...Or this one... This one. Urchin was a software company that created a popular web analytics program. So popular, in fact, that Google bought it in 2005 and turned it into Google Analytics. Yes, I know. All online roads lead back to Google. But anyhow, since their analytics tool is so widely used, so are the UTM tags Urchin developed.

There are five of these tags, but in Google Analytics, just three of them are required, and here’s a broken apart URL tagged with them.

www.drivektc.com/?
utm_source=indeed
&utm_medium=organic
&utm_campaign=one_good_reason

I realize this looks like an intimidating mess of code, but don’t let it scare you because we’re in nerd mode, and nerds fear no code. We’ll view this piece by piece, and by the end it’ll be perfectly clear.

So this first part of the URL is simply the web address of our fictional carrier, the Keep On Trucking Company. This is our actual link, and everything else that follows is just a string of URL tags for tracking purposes.

Separating the address from the tags are a forward slash and question mark.

utm_source=indeed

And then we have the first tag: UTM Source. It describes the location of the job ad. This one is on Indeed, so that’s why the source equals Indeed.

Next, we have an ampersand to divide this first tag from the second one.

utm_medium=organic

This is UTM Medium. This tag describes what type of ad it is. In this case, it equals organic because it’s just a regular job posting on Indeed. We’re not paying to promote it, so someone will only find it in organic search results. If we were promoting it, we could change the medium to something like CPC since it would be a cost-per-click ad. Again, there’s another ampersand after the second tag and before the last one.

utm_campaign=one_good_reason

Last is UTM Campaign. It’s where you describe which overall campaign this individual ad is part of. You might recall from previous Sessions that Keep On Trucking’s current campaign is about how drivers don’t have one good reason to stay. So this ad is tagged as part of the “one good reason” campaign.

And that’s the end of the URL and the end of our technical close-up. You can now remove your nerd glasses. But I hope this has helped you get a better picture of how tags work and how much information they can give you about your advertising sources.

After devoting this time to UTM tags, I do want to emphasize that you don’t have to specifically use them. That will depend on your preferences and on your web analytics tool. Some of them are made to use UTMs. Others come with their own tags, and pretty much all of them let you create your own custom tags. Any of those options can work just fine. Whatever tags you use, just be sure they clearly identify your ad sources, and that you use them consistently in all your URLs. Because that’s how you’re going to see which ads drive traffic to your site and which don’t.

That’s essential for seeing results, but it doesn’t show us everything. In fact, it stops short of the most important insights. We certainly need ads to get drivers to our landing pages, but even more than that, we need those drivers to apply and get hired. So what sorts of tools and techniques can show us which ads lead to applications and hires? We’ll discuss those in our next Session. Until then, I’m Matt.