Who's Actually Reading Your Emails and InMails? Here's a Great Way to Accurately Measure It

How do you find out if the people you send emails to about jobs actually click on that link to the job and read about it? Surely you can’t track what goes on within a private email between you the recruiter and them the candidate?

Actually you can. Using what’s called an Urchin tracker, you can trace what happens to any link you place. The Google Url Builder is a brilliant tool that incorporates the links you want to trace in to your Google Analytics account, enabling you to successfully measure how your email communication is performing, and take action to rectify your approach.

Firstly, you will need access to your website’s Google Analytics tool. Google Analytics is a free service to websites that requires the website administrator to place a small piece of Java Script code in to the website’s header, and it then measures every visit and action that happens on your website. (Your site will more than likely already have it, just ask the person in charge of your analytics account to do this tracking for you.)

When you reach out to someone via LinkedIn or elsewhere about a potential position, it’s highly likely that you’re going to include a link to the full job description. If you have passed their spam filter, and their subject line bullshit detector, then most people, at the very least, are going to read your mail. I’m guessing that if the person is even semi-interested, they’ll click through to the link you’ve shared with them. Those that don’t even click on the link are probably not interested at all. But, if they’ve gone to the trouble of checking out your job description, I’d bet you’d like to talk to them. This begs the question: what percentage of those that click on your job description apply to you or reply?

We spend a lot of time coaching recruiters on how to write engaging copy that will ensure the maximum response rate, but sometimes your job description is going to turn people off, and it’s important to know whether it was the job description or the initial email copy that let you down. Here’s how to measure exactly how many people clicked through to that link, which then enables you to compare this to the number of people who came back to you via email or phone.

Think about it – if very few people replied to you, and you know that very few clicked on the link, then you need to change your email copy or retarget your search. If lots of people have clicked through to your job description yet very few replied, then you need to fix that job description because it’s killing you.

So, click here to get to the URL Builder within Google Analytics.

When you get there, just follow the really simple steps – enter in your specific website URL (so the particular URL of the job role, for example http://www.jobs.com/job_id_12345), the campaign source (so this would be your email campaign newsletter, or a specific InMail targeting just one person), the campaign medium (so again, email), and then the Campaign Name (for example, digital marketing role).

Then click “Generate URL”, and Google will produce a URL with those trackers and identifying keywords you’ve just entered in to it. Copy and Paste that URL and insert that particular link in to your email instead of the plain link with no urchin.

Now when you look at your Google Analytics to measure the visits to your website, you can clearly see how many clicks that link received, where they visited from (general location), how long they stayed on that page, and where they went to afterwards (ie, did they hit the “Apply” button. There’s further ways of measuring a funneled journey through your site ending in the “Thanks for your Application page”, but that’s for another day!).

It’s a really simple thing, adding urchin trackers to links, but rarely done. How can you tell if your communication efforts are actually successful if you don’t measure them? Knowing what works and what doesn’t is really important for recruiters, as we only have a limited amount of time to spend and lots of tasks to do in order to recruit someone for our vacancies. If your calls to action aren’t calling loud enough, then you know you have some work to do. Try out this urchin tracker measurement of your email communications first and see if this makes a difference to how to communicate to your potential candidates.