The Ultimate Guide to Audience Analysis for Job Classifieds

Between 2019 and 2020, the number of job seekers surged from 187 million to 220 million worldwide. This increase came after ten years of relative stability.

The pandemic’s impact on the job market was more severe than on other industries. Jobseekers will always compete for jobs, but a sharp uptick in digitalization caused the job market to boom. July 2021 saw 2 billion total visits to career websites – up 12% as compared to the year before.

Online job search has created a highly competitive marketplace coupled with huge potential audience size and reach. To succeed in the online world, digital researchers need more efficient digital research solutions and data-driven audience analysis.

Why analyze your audience?

When it comes to job and employment websites, people aren’t necessarily looking for what you offer. Your audience is either looking to employ or be employed. Your job is to make both processes as convenient and efficient as possible. To achieve that, you need to know what your audience is after, how they behave, and who you are competing with for their attention.

Audience analysis allows you to identify target audiences and understand how to reach them. It includes analyzing how visitors search, what type of content they consume, which sites they visit, and how they reach your site. You’ll also factor in demographic and geographic analysis to get a better idea of the people behind the numbers. Gradually, you’ll start to understand the audience’s characteristics, behavior, and needs.

This understanding is vital for targeting various market segments and optimizing user experience. It also helps you pinpoint new audiences to expand your offering and reach. Understanding your audience impacts your marketing decisions and may also dictate the features you offer on your site or even alter its concept.

What makes your audience unique?

Let’s look at what makes the job market unique and sets you apart from other industries competing online. Keep these factors in mind when you dive into your audience analysis.

1. The job market encompasses practically everyone in the world 

Larger job portals, such as indeed.com, monster.com, and glassdoor.com are globally recognized and serve a wide range of people. However, many smaller sites dominate a specific niche or region. You can use audience analysis to determine your own niche audience.

2. By default, you have two target audiences

Unlike many other industries, you have two distinct target audiences: companies offering jobs and individuals seeking employment. In other words, you are a matchmaker who needs to satisfy the needs of two completely different markets.

Audience Analysis Guide for Job Classifieds

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3. You’re not necessarily on your audience’s mind

Keep the search intent at the forefront of your audience analysis. That makes your service somewhat secondary, as you are just the middleman between your audience and their ultimate end goal. You should remember that when you analyze keywords and benchmark engagement metrics.

4. Visitors come to you with an essential, one-time need.

If we focus just on job seekers, this audience will come to your website looking for a specific desired result. Once they’ve achieved it, they may not have use for your website anymore. What this means is you have limited time to make an impact. However, if you are successful in helping users get a job, they’re more likely to return to your site in the future.

4 types of audience analysis

It’s critical to correctly define your audience. There are a few different types of audience analysis that can help you understand if the numbers you see represent visitors searching for jobs, companies searching for employers, or something in between, and in turn, optimize your strategy for each.

Audience analysis typically starts with demographics. This includes location, age, gender, and additional key information for individuals. If your audience consists of businesses, you need to research company size, industry type, and so on.

To take your audience analysis further, you can tack on one of these three additional types:

1. Behavioral analysis investigates how visitors engage with your site and how they get there.
2. Psychographic analysis investigates the shared interests, values, and beliefs of your audience.
3. Situational analysis investigates the setting of your audiences’ visits, such as the type of device they use, the time of day they are active, and the level of familiarity they have with your service.

Get started with competitive audience analysis

Analyzing your audience demographics, behavior, and interests helps you paint accurate audience profiles. But to grow your business and build your brand, you need to put those numbers in context.

How is your competitors’ audiences different from yours? Where do they overlap? Where does geography or age factor in? Identify strengths and weaknesses to focus on more clearly defined groups.

Not sure where to even begin with the answers? In our exclusive guide for job classifieds, we walk you through audience analysis from start to finish, including the key metrics to monitor and current industry benchmarks. If you want to see our features in action, try Similarweb now for free and start analyzing your own data.

Download the guide and learn how to:

• Identify your target audience with four different types of analysis.
• Measure and track key data, like audience overlap, demographics, and loyalty.
• Benchmark your engagement metrics and website performance against competitors.

by Molly Winik

Senior Content Marketing Manager

Molly has 8+ years of experience in marketing, content creation, and PR. Her work has been featured on Mention, The Times of Israel, and Culture Trip.