Delivering Backlink Recommendations to the Customer

A backlink is a link from one online source (website, blog, and so on) to another online source. In the context of SAP SuccessFactors Recruiting, it is a link from the customer's corporate career site to pages on their Career Site Builder (CSB) site.

The tracking functionality records where the candidate came from before arriving at the CSB career site. All backlinks to the career site should be source-coded (and, optionally, campaign- coded) for optimal tracking.

The figure titled Backlink on a Customer's Corporate Website is from a customer’s corporate website. When a candidate selects Careers, they are linked to the company’s CSB career site. When the customer generates reports from the Source Tracker or Advanced Analytics, they will be able to see how many candidates arrived at their career site from their corporate site.

The referral engine is the backend system that hosts a list of all source types and source engines, and manages the rules in our tracking engine.

When your customer’s CSB site goes live, the Support team needs to add the customer's corporate site domain to the referral engine to ensure that candidate traffic from their sites is tracked as careersite in Recruiting Advanced Analytics. You need to submit a support ticket to have this work done. This is described later in this unit.

For customers with a fully hosted implementation, there is typically just one link on their corporate site that directs candidates to their CSB career site. As shown in the previous example, we recommend that customers add ?utm_source=careersite to the end of this backlink so candidates linking from the customer’s corporate site to the CSB career site are uniformly captured as careersite. For example, if the original link on the customer’s site directs to https://jobs.company.com (their Career Site Builder site), recommend that the company update the link to https://jobs.company.com/?utm_source=careersite.

Many customers have multiple links from their corporate site to their Career Site Builder site. This is especially true for customers with an integrated implementation, where they host their own careers page(s). Some of these customers use the default source of "careersite" for all traffic coming from their corporate site. Other customers prefer to separate out traffic from backlinks on their corporate site from the organic activity coming into their CSB site as a different source. An example of organic activity is when a candidate goes to the customer's Career Site Builder site directly. These customers typically use ?utm_source=corpsite to track activity from backlinks on their corporate site, rather than using the default ?utm_source=careersite.

In addition to tracking the source, the leading practice is for customers to add a campaign code to each of the backlinks on their corporate site in order to provide additional information from their Advanced Analytics reporting. As described earlier, the campaign tag is added after the source tag with the syntax &utm_campaign=tagname. So the full syntax is https:// jobs.company.com/?utm_source=sourcename&utm_campaign=tagname. Only one source and one campaign code can be tracked for each backlink.

Example of Backlinks from SAP

Here is an example of a backlink from SAP’s corporate site to the career site built with Career Site Builder.

Notice that, in addition to using the ?utm_source=CareerSite, SAP also appends a campaign code: &utm_campaign=CorpSite_FT.

Customers are very interested in understanding the conversion rates of candidates from visitor to apply. Is the conversion rate better for links for one brand over another brand from their corporate site? To track this, the customer would use a unique campaign code in the tracking links for each of their brands. In this way, they know exactly on which brand link the candidate clicked to arrive at the Career Site Builder site.

Assume that a customer has two brands, Brand1 and Brand 2. They have a link from each brand to their CSB site. Those links may be named in the following way to produce accurate reporting: https://jobs.company.com/?utm_source=careersite&utm_campaign=Brand1 and https://jobs.company.com/?utm_source=careersite&utm_campaign=Brand2.

Use the Backlink Recommendations tab in the RMK configuration workbook to generate and deliver backlink suggestions for your customers. Two examples are provided in the workbook.

The following information refers to the figure titled Backlink Recommendations Tab in the RMK Configuration Workbook

• Refer to rows 4 and 5 (the header rows) when working with your customer to build the backlinks.
• The first three columns (A-C) refer to the originating link on the customer's corporate career site.
• The next three columns (D-F) refer to the target location on the Career Site Builder site.
• Collect the source information from your customer in columns G and H, and campaign information in column I.
• The completed backlink is auto-generated in column J. This is the final link your customer will use on their corporate site.

• Dropdowns are provided with options for column E (Page Type on CSB Site) and column G (Source).
• There is an auto-fill formula in column H (Source Tracking) and a concatenate formula in column J (Completed Backlink).

In rows 11-13, AGCO is separately tracking candidates who used the CAREERS link in the header and footer on their corporate site home page to navigate to their CSB site, and also track candidates who navigated to CSB from their Fendt-branded page.