3 Reasons You’re Not Getting Results From Your Performance-Based Advertising Budget

[View the 2019 updated version of this post here: 3 Reasons You're Not Getting Results From Your Programmatic Job Advertising Budget]

Performance-based advertising, first made popular by Google Adwords, is now the standard model by which most job search engines operate today. Essentially, this ad model works by charging advertisers based on how well their ad performs, often calculated on a per-click or per-application basis.

Seems simple, right? All you need to do is pick a source, set a budget and wait for the clicks, or applicants, to roll in.

But with this kind of strategy, or lack there off, are you really getting the most bang for your buck? As companies begin to use performance-based ads for jobs for the first time, they’ll quickly learn that a major factor in the success or failure of their campaigns will lie in their ability to set an appropriate budget.

This, of course, is a difficult and time consuming process, and one that won’t be easy to navigate for first time performance-based ad buyer. With that said, let’s look at some common obstacles you’ll no doubt encounter along the way.

Here are three reasons you’re not getting the results you want from your performance-based advertising budget:

• Budget doesn’t match the bids: This means you’ve arbitrarily set bids for your various jobs based on what you thought was a fair market value for an applicant. However, you did not factor in possible click volume to understand how fast bids might add up and begin eating away at your budget.  This could result in blowing through your budget just two weeks into the month, leaving you with little or no resources moving forward.
• Budget doesn’t match the size: This seems simple--your budget needs to be large enough to cover the size of your campaigns.  Yet, there are a lot of intricacies to consider here.  If you post 500 jobs, for example, and set a budget of $1,000, you are assuming a budget of $2 per job.  But, what happens when one job spends $4? Essentially, this job would have pulled the $2 budget from another job, leaving one of your posts without a budget. When this happens, the result is often a low number of applications received across the board or a number of jobs receiving no applicants at all.
• Budget is static: If performanced-based advertising were a silver bullet you could set your budget once and not have to worry about it again. But, unfortunately, that just isn’t the case. If your budget is static--meaning it never changes--then you’ll no doubt run into one of the two problems stated above. In fact, the only time a static budget works is if the number of jobs you’re posting never changes. Even if you’re posting fewer jobs than previously, a static budget will hurt you in that it is now creating waste (spending when you don’t need/want to be).

Due to its stronger value proposition, performance-based advertising has captured a larger share of recruitment advertising spend, and the shift away from older advertising models has accelerated rapidly. Unfortunately, as companies adopt this new strategy, they will quickly learn that performance-based advertising is a time-consuming process that can be difficult to navigate for first-time buyers. Similarly to the introduction of Google Adwords for traditional marketers, those who lead the way with performance-based advertising for jobs will be the companies that make this advertising strategy a core competency--be it through in-house recruitment marketers or through the use of agency services.

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