AT ALBION, WE DO THINGS DIFFERENTLY…

Most leading employment and jobs websites are well aware of the benefits of attaining high search engine rankings in Google’s results pages is the key to generating a highly qualified stream of relevant website visitors. These website visitors make up the majority of both the clients and candidates that are searching for jobs or looking to fill a vacancy. However, Google is pushing the natural search results further down the search engine results pages, so achieving maximum visibility usually requires advertising using Google Pay Per Click ads.

Those that do enjoy the benefit of paid search traffic generally take the lion’s share of the employment sector market. When done correctly this continuous stream of highly targeted traffic generates profitable streams of revenue from those who fill out a form on an employment website and convert. Converting search traffic into sales can be highly scalable too – simply because a share of the profit generated from paid search can be reinvested back into Pay Per Click advertising to reap more and more sales conversions.

Furthermore, those that enjoy a well-structured and strategic Google Ads campaign also benefit from the ability to refine their advertising campaigns in a way that generates the maximum revenue for the minimal outlay. Reducing wasted advertising spend whilst growing an advertising campaign can return twice as much profits than it can costs to run. And by reviewing the search queries used by visitors who click on your ads is an essential task, this allows you to see where your competition is leaving money on the table.

We have created a number of highly profitable Google Ads accounts for websites in the employment and jobs sectors and time and time again we see that lots of brands in the sector are wasting a large share of their budget on clicks that will never convert into a job application or a vacancy submission. Usually, this is because campaigns are not adequately optimised to deter those who are not most likely to convert on the website. Indeed, many campaigns send the wrong visitors to the wrong pages, provide the wrong messaging and don’t even provide a simple online form at the top of the landing page.

For example, we provide free Google Ads campaign reviews for prospective clients and time and time again we come across the same mistakes that waste advertising budget month in, month out. Take a look at the below and ask yourself if your PPC agency is making these PPC mistakes – with your budget:

• Failing to review search queries and continually add relevant negative keywords
  Say you are advertising a job for a “primary school teacher in Brighton”. Unless you add the names of the main cities in the UK and words such as “pre-school”, “pre”, “secondary”, “college”, “tips”, “qualifications”, “training”, “news”, “worst” and many others, as negative keywords, your site will receive countless “happy clickers” who are not in the market for your product but who cost you money for every unwanted click.
• Failing to track and optimise for job application conversions
  Your landing page should include a form that is tracked as a conversion whenever it is filled in by a website visitor. However, unless you import this conversion goal into Google Ads, you won’t be able to see which keyword phrases are actually turning into applications – Therefore you will never find out which are the most lucrative keyword phrases or targeting options. This leaves your advertising campaign blindly sending traffic that doesn’t achieve your goals and only costs you money.
• Failing to adjust bids for profitable devices and locations
  In the above example, you wouldn’t want to receive clicks from people in Scotland if you were paying the same per click for prospective candidates in East Sussex. That would be just throwing money down the pan. Similarly, if your conversion data showed that clicks that came from mobile devices hardly ever converted you would be wise to vastly reduce your bid prices on those non-profitable devices.
• Failing to adjust bids for profitable times of the day or days of the week
  Again, if you found from your historic advertising data that paid search clicks cost twice as much during office hours, but they converted just as often as clicks on the weekend, then you would be foolish not to send the majority of your budget to weekend or evening clicks. After all your goal is to generate the most conversions for the cheapest cost, so often avoiding highly competitive times and keywords is the key to optimising your account.

Pay Per Click advertising on Google’s Search Network can be a quick and easy way to gain maximum visibility in the search results. However, what most employment website owners and job sector brands don’t realise, is that Google’s Display Network (GDN) allows advertisers to use image ads to “pinch” high-value potential clients directly from competitors.

By simply listing your main competitor’s web page URLs and adding them to your Google Ads account, you are able to create custom “audiences”. Targeting competitor web page visitors with your images ads can be a highly profitable way to achieve increased conversions for a much lower cost – simply because display ads clicks usually come in at less than a quarter of the price of search advertising clicks. Imagine you saw a job vacancy on Monster.com and wanted to get in front of all its visitors (because you offered a similar job yourself). You can reach these potential clients and candidates easily with Google display ads. The options are endless, once you understand the hidden benefits of specialist education sector advertising strategy.

Long gone are the days when you had to pay through the nose for search advertising to generate a stream of highly qualified traffic to your page. With a well structured, tactical, set of display network image ad campaigns countless employment and jobs sites are able to fill their vacancies more quickly and more cheaply than those who think search advertising is the best, or only option.

It’s true that many generalist digital marketing agencies that manage pay per click advertising accounts for employers and job listing websites have yet to catch up with the latest targeting methods. And because they don’t have a proven history of creating profitable Pay Per Click advertising campaigns for employment sector sites, they don’t perform as well as you would expect. Indeed, those agencies that don’t take the opportunity to help their clients profit from the latest targeting methods are doing their clients a disservice.

At Albion, we already know the majority of the negative keywords your jobs site advertising account is likely missing. We already know the chances of a form being filled in by someone on a mobile, tablet or desktop. We even understand the areas of digital advertising that have wasted your competitors’ advertising budgets month after month – simply because we understand the market, we know job seeker’s online behaviours and the key elements that are often missing from PPC landing pages on jobs websites.

So before you continue with another month’s worth of advertising spend that you can’t prove is turning into profits, be sure to have a team with specialist knowledge provide a Google Ads account review and recommendations. It may be the most important thing you do for your business all year.