Getting more people to learn about Trakstar Hire has been both fun and challenging. If you promote a SaaS product like me, you spend most of your time trying to increase visits and signups on your website. The challenge is that you do not always know where these visits are coming from. In other words, you do not know which of your marketing efforts are working better than others.
Of course, there are great analytics tools which tell us a lot about our visits. But I am talking about the stuff we cannot track. For instance, if half of your traffic is “direct” or an organic search for your “company name,” then you cannot attribute it correctly to a particular marketing campaign or referral link. While our traffic grows, this has been happening a lot. We figured we would eventually get indications of certain referral links or sources that are working, but it’s pretty much a fruit salad till now.
What happens in the physical world is that person ‘A’ reads about us in an article, or may have seen the MSNBC news coverage. About a week later, this person is sitting in a meeting at work where they are discussing a need for an applicant tracking system. He suddenly remembers reading about Trakstar Hire and suggests it to the HR manager. The manager in turn visits the site directly and we do not know the true source of this visit.
I understand that this is a good problem to have. I mean word-of-mouth is what you hope will carry you forward. But the problem is that in the absence of measuring what is working, you are endlessly experimenting in a blind, online world. Conversely, there are some intuitive solutions to steer the ship in the right direction. We do some broad brush analysis on what happened during a particular week or month when we got more registrations. And there is always a short list that we can come up with.