Metrics, metrics, metrics. That’s the heart of recruiting today and with good reason: data helps us make informed decisions and allocate precious resources in more targeted, effective ways. Metrics are also handy for getting people on board when it comes time to strategizing and building budgets. However, when it comes to collecting and analyzing those metrics, it can be tough to know how to get started and understand how your recruitment technology gets you to that end data. Let’s look at some of the key areas that you can use to evaluate how your job advertising tech is helping you meet your goals.

User Interactions: Session Length and Bounce Rates

One of the biggest assets of recruitment technology like programmatic job advertising is the information it gives you about how people are interacting with your job advertisements. Before, you’d have to compare end results across a number of different factors. Now the tech does this for you and can show you what’s happening in each individual job ad placement.

Session duration is a deeper analysis of the time a user spends on your job ad. It’s not an overall average of time spent on a page; it’s a snapshot of how much time a browser spent on the site, interacting with your page. Why is this helpful? If people are just glancing at your ad and clicking away, that tells you that your ad could be more engaging or that maybe you’re not targeting the right audience.

Bounce rates are also helpful in determining how people are viewing your ad. When a user clicks on your link but leaves the site after that initial click, that’s the bounce. If your bounce rate is high, it could be two different issues that warrant a deeper look. It could simply mean there’s a loading issue with your page and users aren’t able to stay on the page. It could also be that users aren’t finding what they want when they click on your ad. At that point, it’s time to re-evaluate if you’re targeting the right people or if your content is engaging enough to hold attention.

Return on Ad Spend (ROAS)

You’re probably familiar with return on investment (ROI) as a common metric. That’s still important in evaluating your overall advertising strategy. What recruitment technology can help you do is drill down into the more granular return on ad spend (ROAS). While ROI tells you the overall effectiveness of your advertising, ROAS looks at specific ad placements and campaigns.

ROAS is a way of measuring your campaign’s success in real time instead of aggregating it at the end. ROAS is the cost of your ad campaign, divided by the ad costs. If your ROAS is 4:1 or higher, this generally means success! If it’s 3:1 or lower, that means it’s time to take a closer look at the numbers to see if a) they’re accurate, and b) you might be spending too much on ad placements that just aren’t effective.

Cost-Per-Click

Clicks are a basic step in figuring out how successful your ad placement is. Quite simply, if people are clicking, they’re interested. This is also a metric that doesn’t require waiting to see what the end revenue is. You can take the number of clicks at any point and divide it by what you’ve already spent on the campaign.

A cost-per-click ratio of 5:1 is a standard success rate. If your click rate is low, it might be an issue with your searchability. Consider using more targeted keywords to drive up the click rates and to drive down your cost-per-click.

Cost-Per-Conversion

This is one of the most customizable, useful metrics in your programmatic job advertising repertoire—it helps you see whether users are doing what you want them to do. Do you want to track reads? Newsletter signups? An application link? Conversions are the number of times the user performs a specific actions on your site. This gives you more insight into what users are doing after the initial clicks, and you can divide it into different areas to get even more specific insights.

To get your cost-per-conversion, you divide the total cost of your campaign by the number of specified conversions. This is similar to cost-per-click in that higher costs can help you target your problem solving and help you refine your goals in real time.

Programmatic job advertising can give you unprecedented amounts of data and insight into your campaigns. If you know where to focus your efforts and analysis, you can take that information and use it to set (and meet!) goals for your team, make adjustments to your approach, and get better results, faster.