We recently hired a new member of staff and we advertised it online with a Google Pay Per Click (PPC) advert. The vacancy was for a telemarketing job. I'm not going to go into the detailed specifics of how we did it, that's where our skills and experience come to the fore, but ask nicely and I might let you in on the secret. But the ad was seen 13,085 times in one week and we had 21 people click on the advert, an average click thru rate (CTR) for a total cost of just £23.84 i.e. an average cost per click (CPC) of £1.14.
I was reading through The Gazette not long afterwards and found myself looking at a page that listed the rate card for their recruitment section. Yikes, I thought, I'm glad I'm not in the business of trying to recruit people via the magazine, it's not cheap is it?
So how could Google help? Take a look at the table below. This is real data from Google. It shows that the average cost per click for a generic phase like the ones shown below is just £1.78.
Predicted Status | Estimated | Estimated | Estimated | Estimated | |
Search Total | £1.92 - £2.36 | 1 - 3 | 11 - 15 | £30 - £40 | |
law jobs | Active | £2.02 - £2.53 | 1 - 3 | 3 - 4 | £7 - £20 |
law vacancy | Active | £0.86 - £1.08 | 1 - 3 | 0 | £1 |
legal jobs | Active | £2.11 - £2.64 | 1 - 3 | 5 - 6 | £10 - £20 |
legal vacancy | Active | £1.33 - £1.66 | 1 - 3 | 1 - 2 | £2 - £3 |
solicitor jobs | Active | £2.17 - £2.71 | 1 - 3 | 1 | £3 - £5 |
solicitor vacancy | Active | £1.45 - £1.81 | 1 - 3 | 1 | £1 - £2 |
So if I take the rate card price for a 1/8 page, spot colour advert, this is how the numbers might stack up.
Average CPC = £1.78
Total Number of Clicks = 707
This CPC would get your advert in the top three on Google EVERY time! This may or may not be the right strategy based on what you are actually trying to achieve, but that's a topic for another day.
Now, you need to bear with me for this one. If we assume you use the same kind of keyword and ad copy strategy that we did (don't forget to ask nicely) and assume the same CTR this scales up to mean that your advert would be seen 441,875 times!!!
So, do I think this is realistic? Well look at this on an annual basis. The number above means that your advert would be seen 36,822 times on one month. This might seem like a lot, but there is a tool we can use on Yahoo to help understand if this is a realistic number. If we take the six search terms above and use the Yahoo tool, we see that the total number of times these search terms were used is 8,227.
The research we have done on the web server log files of all the law firm websites we run, shows that Google searches outweigh Yahoo by a factor of 20-30, so lets use a factor of 10 to be conservative.
That means that the 8,227 searches on Yahoo scale up to over 80,000 on Google. That means that 36,822 times per month sounds entirely reasonable.
So what conclusions can we draw?
If you spend £1,259 on a 1/8 page ad in The Gazette and assume that that lifespan is just one week, do you think you will get 707 qualified applicants looking at your ad? I suspect not.
If you apply that same budget to a Google campaign these numbers show that you could easily get 707 people click thru from the advert to the recruitment pages on your website.
I would hope that if you get 707 people look at your job vacancy pages, you would find the right people.
If you would like to discuss any aspects of this article, then please do not hesitate to contact me.