Why have job boards been able to survive the dramatic evolution of online recruitment and job searches? The answer is really quite simple: They’ve found ways to continue to provide value for their clients.
Therefore, any job board serious about continuing to compete in today’s online employment market needs to keep client retention top of mind. This means finding new and creative ways of proving your value, time and time again.
One way job boards have proven valuable to clients is by providing greater exposure to their jobs by supporting them through PPC campaigns on job aggregators and the like. With that said, the ability to show detailed job-level performance data, and the ability to optimize these PPC strategies to produce the greatest ROI, is key to the continued success of any job board in 2016.
To help you accomplish just that, we’ve picked the brains of our in-house recruitment marketing experts to bring you three actionable steps you can take with your PPC strategy to ensure you retain your clients:
- Stop wasting clicks: The PPC model allows you to only pay for clicks that your job postings receive, but not all of the clicks you’re paying for are resulting in applications to your clients’ jobs. Therefore, you may be wasting your PPC budget on non-converting clicks (aka “wasted clicks”). In order to eliminate wasted clicks, stop spending on jobs with low conversion rates--jobs that receive high clicks but low applications. Doing so, requires a detailed understanding of job-level performance. Once you’ve identified the jobs that are responsible for generating wasted clicks and spend, you can then shift your budget away from those open positions and spend more of your budget on jobs that are better converters.
- Optimize for a lower CPA: If we were to take this complicated process and boil it down to one basic truth, it’s that clients use job boards for one thing: more applicants! Therefore, it’s the job boards duty to produce as many applicants as possible, as efficiently as possible. In order to do this, you’ll need to have an analytical understanding of how your current jobs are performing and how jobs have performed in the past. Using this data, you’d be able to accurately predict which jobs will perform well, and which might struggle, before jobs are even posted. This will allow you to shift PPC sponsorship to jobs that will provide the most optimal return, all while limiting the spend on jobs that might prove wasteful. By optimizing your PPC campaigns in this way, you can decrease your average CPA--either across all jobs or a select group--and therefore increase your volume of applicants.
- Manage traffic based on return: One question commonly asked by Job Boards is “how do we keep clients coming back for more?” The answer, of course is quite simple: Produce top results for them and your chance of retention will increase. The best way to do this is by ensuring any jobs you promote for a client produce a positive return on investment while further supporting your higher-investing companies. In order to accomplish this, you’ll want to set spend limits for specific companies, or groups of companies, based on expected ROI. This ensures that you do not invest more than the company has paid for in their contract or package. Keep in mind, it’s important to review the performance of your clients and what they contribute in value to your resume database before you decide on the restrictions their jobs will receive in your PPC strategy.
When it comes down to it, the PPC model can only take job boards so far. In order to truly continue to provide value, and retain clients, you must be able to show--in detail--how your PPC promotion of jobs has resulted in gains for your clients.
If you don’t have access to your performance data and analytics for your jobs, or if you don’t know how to take action on these campaign optimizations, contact us today to learn more.
