How to track and get results from your recruitment marketing campaigns

This blog explains why recruitment marketing tracking lags behind other marketing disciplines, what candidate behaviours you should be measuring, and how to connect your data (analytics, pixels, and ATS) to better understand and prove impact across the full candidate journey.

In e-commerce, every sale is tracked, in lead generation, every form fill is attributed, and in performance marketing, revenue is tied directly to media spend.

But in recruitment marketing, we often rely on last-click ATS data. 

Recruitment marketing is still miles behind e-commerce when it comes to tracking.

In e-commerce, every stage of the customer journey is measured; brands know which ads drove product views, who added items to their cart, who completed a purchase, and exactly how much revenue each channel generated.

Recruitment doesn’t have the same process.

Candidates might see an employer brand campaign, click a job advert, explore the careers site, leave, return later, and eventually apply. Most organisations still measure success through last-click ATS data, which only captures the final step of the journey.

So this means a huge chunk of what recruitment marketing actually does never shows up in the reports. Marketing might be the reason someone got interested, changed how they see the company, and eventually came back to apply, but the system just credits their last touch point. For recruitment marketing to be taken as seriously as performance marketing, it needs the same kind of visibility.

To prove the value of employer brand and recruitment marketing investment, organisations need to track candidate behaviour across the journey, not just the outcome.

Key signals include:

These actions show candidate intent and reveal how marketing influences decisions before an application is submitted.

For example, an ATS might show 50 applications from paid media, but behavioural tracking may reveal that many more candidates interacted with recruitment campaigns before applying.

Without tracking, marketing appears responsible for only the final step. With it, you can show influence across the full candidate journey.

You don’t usually need to replace your recruitment tech stack to improve tracking. In most cases, it’s about connecting three things: careers site analytics, platform pixels, and ATS data.

1. Track behaviour on the careers site

Your careers site should have analytics in place (such as Google Analytics). This allows you to measure traffic to job pages, candidate sources, and visit-to-application conversion rates.

2. Deploy platform pixels across the candidate journey

Platforms such as LinkedIn, Meta, and Google provide tracking pixels that should be installed across your careers site. Once implemented, actions can be tracked through event tracking or custom conversions, identifying when candidates view job pages, click apply, start an application, or complete it.

These signals allow platforms to optimise campaigns towards real candidate intent, rather than simply optimising for clicks.

For example: You’re running a campaign targeting Software Engineers in and around London. Candidates click on your ad and land on your careers site, where many go on to click “Apply Now”.

With tracking in place, platforms can connect these actions back to the campaign, allowing you to see how many candidates applied after viewing or clicking your ad.

Once enough data is gathered (typically 50+ conversions), the platform can use this behaviour as a learning signal, optimising delivery towards users more likely to click “Apply” and start an application. Essentially, driving more conversions and Apply now clicks. 

3. Use ATS data to confirm hiring outcomes

Your ATS should remain the source of truth for applications, candidate progression, and hires, as pixel tracking is limited by the disconnect between the career site and ATS, and can only measure activity up to application completion. This means the ATS is the only place where you can track the full candidate journey, with visibility into every stage of the candidate process (e.g. how many apps reach the hire stage to show quality). 

When behavioural tracking, media data, and ATS outcomes are viewed together, recruitment teams can understand which channels generate the strongest candidates and which campaigns influence hiring outcomes.

When the right tracking is in place, recruitment marketing becomes far more measurable and teams can start answering important questions such as:

Creative engages people, media drives reach and volume and action to the career site.

 Tracking proves the value of recruitment marketing and employer brand investment.

If recruitment marketing wants to operate like performance marketing, it needs to measure performance in the same way.

If you’re looking to properly track recruitment marketing performance or want to launch a campaign that helps solve a hiring challenge, we’d love to help.

Get in touch or explore some of our recent work to see how we’ve elevated employer brands and supported talent attraction across multiple industries.