Job Applicants Counted as Customer Enquiries

A busy month nobody felt

The monthly report shows the best month of the year for enquiries. The goal in Google Analytics has climbed since September, and the graph looks like a marketing success.

Then the office manager mentions that the phones were quiet, and the sales team says October felt ordinary. Nobody can point to the extra customers the report describes.

Usually Analytics is not wrong. It counts what it was set up to count, and that includes people who were never customers.

One thank-you page for every form

Most enquiry goals are destination goals: a completion is counted whenever someone reaches the thank-you page. On many sites, several forms send people to that same page.

• The contact form, the one the goal was meant for.
• The careers form, busy whenever a job is posted.
• The newsletter signup, often in the footer of every page.
• A quote or booking form added after the goal was set up.
• A warranty or registration form for people who have already bought.

Each is worth counting, but counted under one name the total means nothing. To a destination goal, a job application and a request for a quote look identical.

Why the count rises with hiring

Job postings send applicants to the careers page in waves. A busy hiring month, or one job ad shared widely, fills the goal without a single customer involved, and the graph shows a peak nobody in sales recognises.

Newsletter signups move with contests and promotions the same way. The enquiry graph ends up tracking hiring and promotions, with the real enquiries buried inside it.

Finding out what was counted

The Reverse Goal Path report, under Conversions and Goals, shows the pages each visitor saw just before completing the goal. If many paths run through the careers page, there is the answer.

The Navigation Summary for the thank-you page works from the other side, listing the pages visitors arrived from, each form page among them.

Compare the goal's monthly totals with the inboxes too. If the contact inbox received a fraction of what the goal reports, and the hiring inbox holds the rest, the picture is complete.

A confirmation page for each form

The fix is to give each form its own confirmation page: one address after a customer enquiry, another after a job application, another after a newsletter signup.

The pages can look alike but should say different things. An applicant learns when to expect word about the job; a customer learns who will answer and by when.

Where separate pages are awkward, the form can send an event to Analytics when it is submitted successfully, naming the form. An event goal then counts each form separately.

Either way, the signal must come from a successful submission. An event sent when the button is clicked also counts forms rejected for a missing field.

Goals that say what they count

Set one goal per form and name it plainly: customer enquiry, job application, newsletter signup. Anyone reading the report should not need to know how the site is built.

If the account imports goals into AdWords, import only the customer goals. An imported goal tells AdWords a click led to a conversion, so ads that attract job seekers would look like ads that attract customers.

Give the customer goal a value only if you know roughly what an enquiry is worth, and leave values off the others.

A worked example

A vacation rental manager on the Sunshine Coast looks after forty holiday homes for their owners: bookings, cleaning, repairs and guest arrivals.

Its website has a form for owners who want a property managed, a booking enquiry form for guests, a careers form for housekeepers and maintenance staff, and a newsletter signup.

All four led to one thank-you page, counted by a single goal called Enquiries. Every spring and fall, when the company hired housekeepers for the season, enquiries appeared to surge.

The Reverse Goal Path showed the careers page behind most completions in those months. Owner enquiries, the ones the business most wanted, were a small part of the total.

Each form now has its own confirmation page and goal, and only owner and guest enquiries are imported into AdWords.

The owner enquiries goal now moves only when owners enquire, so a hiring season no longer reads as a marketing success, and a quiet month for owners shows up as one.

The months already recorded

Goals count from the day they are created or changed. They do not reach back and correct earlier months, so the old totals stay mixed.

Add an annotation to the graph on the day of the change, so anyone comparing this winter with last winter knows why the line moved.

For a rough history, the hiring inbox shows how many applications arrived each month, and those can be set against the old totals.

Testing every form

After the change, submit each form once while someone watches the Real-Time reports. Each submission should land in its own goal, and nowhere else.

Check the emails at the same time. Splitting confirmation pages sometimes breaks a form's own notification, and a careers form that stops reaching the hiring inbox is worse than a mixed report.

The counter-case

Where a site has only one form, there is nothing to separate. The same goes for a site where job applications go by email to an address on the careers page.

A business that never reads its goals report, judging marketing by the phone and the inbox, also loses little to a mixed count.

But once anyone uses that report to judge an ad, a campaign or a new page, the forms need separating. A number that mixes applicants with customers misleads whoever trusts it.

Giving each form its own count

1. Write down every form the site has.
2. Note where each form sends people afterwards.
3. Open the Reverse Goal Path for the current goal.
4. Give each form its own confirmation page or event.
5. Set one goal per form, named plainly.
6. Import only customer goals into AdWords.
7. Submit every form once and watch the counts.

Step two is usually where the problem shows itself. Forms added over the years by different people tend to reuse whatever thank-you page already existed.

A related case, where an online shop's Analytics shows sales that never happened because the receipt page loads more than once, is covered in orders counted twice when the receipt page reloads.

Frequently asked questions

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