In this guide, we'll explore five key metrics to consider when evaluating the effectiveness and success of your job board in generating revenue.
How to find important metrics
Every job board is different and needs to look at different KPIs. So take a step back and pinpoint what it is that you’re trying to achieve. What means “success” in the context of your job board? Then, set your success metrics and KPIs (key performance indicators) according to your goal.
Before we jump in the 6 top metrics, here are some examples of overall goals you could have for your job board:
Revenue is your #1 goal
Naturally, revenue is a primary objective for most job board owners. However, you want to consider supplementary goals that support this overarching objective. For example, cultivating an engaged community, building authority in your niche, or driving prospects to an existing business of yours. By aligning those secondary objectives with revenue goals, you can create a better long-term strategy to sustainable (revenue) growth.
Building an email list
If your focus is building an email subscriber base, the number of job seekers signing up for your newsletter and the list’s growth rate become critical metrics. A robust email list not only serves as a channel for keeping job seekers—especially passive ones—engaged but also offers potential monetization opportunities in the future.
For example, the SaaS business Draft.dev use their job board not only to drive a secondary stream of revenue, but also to build an email list of professionals in their niche to be monetized in the future.
Creating a niche community
For job boards aiming to build a tight-knit community around their niche, KPIs related to user engagement and interaction are key. Monitoring metrics such as share of returning visitors, time spent on site, and number of pages visited per session can provide insights into the value of your site and the strength of your community.
A niche community can help with driving traffic to your board, building trust in your industry, positioning yourself as an authority, and sourcing prospects for your existing brand.
For example, the content marketing community Superpath has grown from 1k to 20k members with the help of their job board, driving traffic and adding value to the community.
Establishing industry connections with employers
A job board can also be a effective way to strengthen relationships with employers in your niche. A great place to get started with networking are local industry associations (think: association of cybersecurity professionals) or chambers of commerce in your industry.
If this is part of your goal, metrics related to free and paid job postings, qualitative employer feedback, and employer retention rates should be looked at. Understanding how employers engage with your platform and the effectiveness of job postings can help you adjust your offers to keep employers happy.
For example, this Painter job board shows display ads from employers on their job board that help build industry connections.
6 important metrics to evaluate success
Once you have your goals set out clearly, define your leading KPIs. These 6 metrics are a great starting point:
1. Time spent on site
Time spent on site serves as a metric for assessing user intent and satisfaction. Longer time durations indicate that visitors are finding relevant content and understand how to interact with your job board. Conversely, shorter durations may signal unmet expectations (check whether your title or url could have a secondary search intent by doing a quick google search) or difficulty in navigating your platform (check whether you have the most important job seeker filters in place).
Analyzing user behavior can point you towards areas that need improvement, such as optimizing search filters or providing more niche-specific content.
Benchmark: An average time spent on site over 1 minute demonstrates good user engagement. But note that this metric is highly dependent on the source of your traffic. Are they coming from a Google search, your business website or even your newsletter? Segment accordingly.
2. Impressions
Impressions indicate the visibility of your platform in the search engine results. When first starting a new website, it takes some time to get the site crawled and indexed by Google to start showing up in the search results. Give your site at least one month to start getting traffic from organic search.
Your keyword optimization—i.e. which title and subtitle you use for your job board and how frequently this term is searched—also plays a huge role in this.
3. Traffic metrics
Traffic metrics include both the volume of visitors to your job board and the sources driving this traffic.
The best way to look at this group of metrics is over time, month over month or year over year. If there are major fluctuations in traffic you should investigate the cause. It could be changes in the overall hiring market, seasonal variations in demand in your industry or the effects of your marketing efforts.
Understanding traffic sources—such as social media, organic search, paid ads, word of mouth, and referrals—allows you to invest more resources in the most profitable channels.
4. Number of jobs posted
The volume of job postings on your platform and the corresponding views each post gets are important signals about your success with employers. Comparing the number of free versus paid job postings is a good indicator of the effectiveness of your job advertisements. You also want to look at which types of roles, employers or job titles attract most views.
For example, if you find out that job listings including a salary range get more views, you can use this information to suggest improvements on job ads to employers.
5. Number of applications
Tracking the volume and quality of job applications provides insights into job seeker engagement and effectiveness of your platform.
Analyzing trends in application volume and applicant quality over time can help evaluate the relevance of your job board to your market. You can also monitor the ratio of jobs posted compared to the number of applications.
Tracking the quality of the applicants can be a bit tricky. The most straight forward way to do this is asking employers to create a feedback loop and notify you if they’ve hired a candidate from your job board.
6. Newsletter subscriptions
The number of visitors opting in the receive job alerts are a good indicator of how relevant your job board is to your users.
Building a robust subscriber base improves audience retention, driving passive job seekers back to your job board and provides a valuable asset for future monetization.
One major factor for success is keeping the emails hyper-relevant to the recipient. That’s why you should let subscribers select frequency and type of jobs they want to receive emails about when subscribing. Your emails will be suitable to the recipients and hence have a much better open and click rate. Plus, you keep your spam rate low and build authority in your audience.
Benchmark: Aim to convert approximately 10% of website visitors into newsletter subscribers, with open rates over 30%, and click rates north of 1%.
Benchmarking your metrics
Once you've identified and tracked your key metrics, interpreting the data is crucial for driving actionable insights.
Internal benchmarks
You might know the popular saying “Compare yourself to who you were yesterday, not to who someone else is today”; the same is true for your job board.
Comparing your own job board's metrics over time provides the most valuable insights into your progress, performance trends, and areas for improvement.
Industry benchmarks
While every job board is unique, industry benchmarks offer interesting points of comparison and insights into broader market trends. Engaging with fellow job board owners and accessing industry reports can provide context for evaluating your performance relative to industry standards.
Two good resources are Job Boards Connect and our Job Board Club full of successful job board owners. Send us a message to get invited to the club!
These key metrics allow you to dive deeper into your job board’s performance and take steps to drive your success. Whether your focus is on revenue generation, community building, or employer engagement, measuring a handful of KPIs is the first step to achieving your goals.