Purpose

The purpose of this article is to outline Eightfold’s source tracking methods.

Audience

This guide is intended for the Recruitment marketing/advertising team and Eightfold’s solution architects.

Overview

Eightfold’s tracking module helps you optimize the visibility of your job postings. You can view these sources in the Source Breakdown section of your Career Sites dashboard.

Parameters

There are following parameters that Eightfold tracks:

1. utm_source
2. utm_campaign
3. src
4. source
5. HTTP referer
6. previous utm_source/src/referer

Tracking methods

Eightfold PCS uses the following approaches to automatically track the source associated with each visitor session in the following priority order:

1.Using the utm_source and utm_campaign URL parameter

UTM (Urchin Tracking Module) parameters are standardized URL parameters you can add to any URL to track source & campaign information. UTM parameters are commonly used in Google Analytics and by online marketers to measure effectiveness of campaigns. These parameters are specified in the job URL that the visitor used to access the career site.

At Eightfold, we track both utm_source and utm_campaign for every user activity. Eightfold PCS uses the utm_campaign URL parameter specified in the job URL to track campaigns. If a visitor uses a URL with a utm_source parameter to access your Eightfold-powered career site, we will prioritize this value as source attribution for all the user activity in a given session.

Sample URL:

https://jobs.xyz.com/careers?utm_source=google&utm_campaign=my_test_campaign

Our job board distribution feed also supports threading through utm_source & utm_campaign values in each Job apply URL to ensure that external job boards where you are publishing your jobs also use those customized utm_source & utm_campaign values that allow you to track attribution from these job boards. Read Set up XML feeds to post jobs to Job Boards for further details.

2.Using src or source URL parameters

Eightfold tracks the src or source parameters specified in the job URL that the visitor used to access the career site. If utm_source is not specified, we then check for a src or source value specified as a URL parameter since many job boards often append these parameters to indicate the job click came from them.

Sample URL:

https://jobs.xyz.com/careers?pid=11666811&src=indeed

3.Inferring source from HTTP referer

If none of the above URL parameters are specified, then we try to automatically infer the source from the referrer of the request. If a user is coming from jobboardX.com > Career Site, then the referer header field in the HTTP request can contain a partial or complete address of the page that made the request. Note that this is only supported if links do not have a “noreferer” header.

Referrer: https://jobboardX.com/

4.Using previous utm_source/src/referer

Eightfold also tracks the previous utm_source/src/referer of the some vs_cookie from the session (if available) in the cases where neither any of the above source tracking URL parameters are specified in the career site URL nor there is any HTTP referer value. We pull the previous utm_source/src/referer of the same vs_cookie (within 7 days).

5.Default

If none of the above source tracking parameters work, we default to ‘Eightfold’ as the source of the visitor. This default can be configured to another value. For example, if a user opened up a new browser tab and directly accessed your company’s career site.

For white label domains (for example, jobs.booking.com), where there is no other referer or source, the referer would be “booking” (the CMS), which is not the case, so we will correct it to 'Eightfold'.

Source attribution rules

To determine which source to attribute, Eightfold checks the following in order and uses the first source it finds:

1. The utm_source URL parameter
2. The utm_campaign URL parameter
3. The src URL parameter
4. The source URL parameter
5. The referer field in the HTTP request
6. The previous utm_source/src/referer of the some vs_cookie
7. Eightfold as the fallback source

For example, if a candidate applies to a job on PCS after clicking a link on Glassdoor, the URL param contains src=Glassdoor, and Glassdoor is mapped in the Referrer Source Map, Eightfold will attribute the source to Glassdoor. If it is not mapped, the source will be Eightfold.

Update/refresh consistency

When a visitor (identified by vs_cookie) leaves the page and comes back via another source or campaign, utm_source and utm_campaign of this visitor would change consistently (whenever utm_source changes, utm_campaign will also get updated, and vice versa).

Utm_campaign tracking & other utm parameters

Eightfold PCS uses the utm_campaign URL parameter specified in the job URL to track campaigns. Utm_campaign is not taken into consideration during the standard ‘application source tracking’ process, but we provide utm_campaign reporting in the Career Site Dashboard.

Other utm parameters (utm_media, utm_term, utm_content, and so on) are currently not supported on Eightfold PCS.