Challenge
The Careers team at Vail Resorts looked to improve their Google Analytics (GA) reporting to see how well organic and paid advertising efforts impacted online job application flow performance. With several worldwide resorts and business units each posting multiple job descriptions, simple GA goal completion and funnel configurations would not provide a scalable solution.
Solution
The first step was to configure GA cross-domain tracking, as the job application flow consisted of viewing job descriptions on Site 1 and submitting the job application form on Site 2. Without cross-domain tracking, successful application form submissions would not be attributable to applicant acquisition sources such as email, display, CPC, email and organic search.
Solving for scalability was the next step. As no more than one GA Goal completion can be counted per Session, this presented a data quality issue if applicants applied for more than one job in a Session. Further, to track job application activity across many separate resorts and business units, it was not practical to set up separate GA Goals and Funnels for each.
Evolytics leveraged GA's Enhanced Ecommerce (EE) framework to solve for both of these issues, repurposing the data schema for traditional product commerce with the desired job application flow dimensions and metrics. For example, the Job Req ID was mapped to the Product SKU dimension in Google Analytics, with the Position Type was mapped to Product Category. Application Starts were mapped as Product Adds to Cart and Application Completes were mapped to Purchases.
After configuring Google Tag Manager (GTM) to collect these dimensions and metrics, the final step was to build an executive dashboard using Google Data Studio (DS). With DS's Data Sources editor, the EE metrics and dimensions were renamed to match the Job Application steps and Job Attribute names shown above.
Results
By leveraging data collection using Google Analytics' Enhanced Ecommerce framework and providing reporting visibility through Data Studio, our client is now able to see the full job application funnel at both the Resort / Business Unit and Job level.
The client can apply learnings from top-performing Resorts to optimize under-performing units, including factors such as:
- Marketing Channel mix that leads to the most Job Description Views
- Job Descriptions that generate the most Apply Starts
- Application form optimizations that lead to the most Apply Completes
With the completion of this project, our client is applying analytics in a new way to help drive success on the Careers team.