Clicksharp Marketing

Job seekers, or anyone seeking employment opportunities, are very active in search engines. With a little care, you can ensure they don’t use up part of your advertising budget.

Your message might be a little more polite… until you realize that job seekers are eating up your advertising budget! (Photo by Daquella manera)

In our last post, we looked at how researchers can represent a sunk cost in a Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising program, by clicking on your ads in their fact finding process… but having no intention to buy anything.

Guess what — these people can burn you twice. Nowadays it’s hard to conduct a job search without using the internet, and if you’re not careful, your ad campaigns may be reeling in these people too.

What do the following keywords have in common?

Management consulting
Real estate law
Video production
Graphic design

All of them are perfectly normal keywords to target for business competing in that category. A management consulting firm certainly has a vested interested in being recognized as such in search engines. But if they don’t install a variety of negative keywords to weed out job seekers, that advertising campaign could run dry of funds pretty quickly.

Not only should you exclude all job-related queries, but consider peripheral keywords that would come into play when evaluating job offers. People might use your company’s website to research an offer from a competitor.

Here’s a partial list of negative keywords to consider, when trying to prevent job seekers from seeing your ads and clicking on them:

• job(s)
• career(s)
• employment
• employer
• work from home
• opening(s)
• listing(s)
• opportunit(ies)
• posting(s)
• salar(ies)
• compensation
• benefit(s)
• package(s)

A final note of caution — many companies will use their websites to promote these same career opportunities and related benefits. Large companies may even have an ad budget dedicated solely to this kind of outreach. However, do remember that you can still use search engine optimization (SEO) to play these up within the organic search results.

Hopefully this will list help you keep job seekers out of the marketing budget, and in HR where they belong. You’ll be spending plenty of money on them once they’re hired, anyway.

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Paul Burani
Clicksharp Marketing
New York, NY

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 27th, 2008 @ 4:16 pm on the category Pay-per-click advertising, SEM. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.


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