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On Monday, you learned how to market your blog and build traffic. How do you know if your marketing efforts are working?
Today, I want to show you how to measure the success (and ROI) of an employer branding blog.
Measuring the Success of Your Employer Branding Blog
You may remember from the last article that there are two ways to define successful employer brand blogging:
- Awareness. How aware are people of your organization and its awesome culture because of your blog?
- Conversions. How many people do you hire through your blog?
We’re going to look at both of those in a bit more detail today.
Measuring Awareness
There are two types of traffic you’ll get on your site:
- Visitors. People who come to your actual site to read your new content.
- Subscribers. People who receive your new content via free email or RSS updates.
All of your readers start off as visitors. If they like your stuff, they may subscribe to get free updates.
Subscribers – generally speaking – are more loyal than general visitors. They’ve opted-in to find out about all of your new stuff. You’re building a relationship with them every time you hit “post.”
One of your goals should be to convert as many people as possible to subscribers.
I’ll show you how shortly. But first, let’s talk about visitors.
Google Analytics
Google Analytics is a free and incredible robust program from Google that gives you all sorts of data on who’s coming to your site and where they’re coming from.
Once you sign up for an account, you get a short piece of code that you insert in the footer of your blog. If you’re using WordPress, there are also a few plugins that will do this for you (though they’re not necessary). If you’re using the Thesis theme, there’s a place in the admin panel for you to enter the code.
Google Analytics gives you a ton of information. Here’s the stuff I think is most important.
- Visits. How many times has your blog been viewed in a given time period.
- Visitors. How many people have viewed your blog in a given time period. A visitor can have multiple visits.
- Traffic Sources. How people are finding your blog.
- Content Overview. What people are looking at on your site.
Putting Analytics Into Context
With analytics, the numbers don’t just speak for themselves. It’s important to look at them in context. Are the number of visitors and visits almost equal? That means people are coming once and then not returning.
Are there only a few visitors and many visits? That means a few people are coming back over and over again to look at your stuff.
What pieces of content have received the most traffic? You may want to write more articles like those. And how did people get to your blog? Are your relationships and marketing efforts paying off?
Converting Visitors Into Subscribers
People who subscribe for free updates to your blog tend to be much more loyal than general visitors are.
So how can you convert visitors into subscribers?
The most important thing is to have content so awesome that people want to get regular updates on what you’re writing. But you also need to make it really easy for them to subscribe.
First, head over to Feedburner (another free tool from Google) and sign-up for an account.
Feedburner lets people receive updates from your site by RSS or email. It also provides free data on how many subscribers you have and what content they’re looking at.
Once you’ve got your feed set up, place links to sign-up by RSS or email prominently on the site. I recommend putting them at the top of your sidebar. I’ve also seen some bloggers add invitations to subscribe at the end of each article.
The important thing is to make sure it’s as easy as possible for people to subscribe.
Measuring Conversions
Awareness is great, but you’re probably hoping to develop a pipeline of great candidates from your employer branding efforts, too.
Measuring success here is actually pretty straightforward. How many of your serious candidates found out about job openings through your blog? How many hires were sourced through the blog?
Not sure? You should be asking!
Initially, you won’t see many conversions from your blog. But as awareness grows, so should your conversions.
What Now?
First, go sign-up for Google Analytics and Feedburner accounts. Add your analytics code to the blog, and place invitations to subscribe prominently on the site.
If you’re not doing this already, start tracking where your candidates and new hires are coming from.
In a few weeks, we’ll be looking at how to expand your employer brand onto to Twitter. Until them, if you have any questions or ideas, leave them in the comments section below.
PS: This article is part of an ongoing series about Employer Branding through Social Media. If you liked it, you may want to check out the rest of the series.
