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Get the most out of Job Board Aggregators as an Advertiser.

If you’re at all involved in recruitment or HR, you should know how to get the best out of job aggregators like Indeed, Jora or Adzuna.

Here’s how.

Cheap, cheap traffic

Job aggregators are a great way to drive cheap traffic. Advertising on job aggregators can be literally 50x cheaper than Linkedin ads. On Indeed for instance, you can expect a 12 cent CPC, compared to say $6 CPC on Linkedin.

It’s also really common to get free traffic from them. Part of their pitch is to be a comprehensive source of all jobs from all companies. So to fulfil that, they scrape career pages and promote those jobs for free.

If you do pay, it’s typically on a pay for performance model, so you only pay when someone clicks on your ad. It’s easy to set up too, you simply send them a RSS or XML feed with your jobs, set your campaign budget, total budget or max CPC and you’re off.

The problem

If you look at your campaign performance in aggregate, you’d probably be pretty happy because it looks like it’s performing well, ie high volume of clicks coming through at a reasonable cost.

However, drill down and you’ll see that it’s highly likely that a small number of high performing ads can suck up ALL YOUR BUDGET.

What’s happening is that Indeed wants to do well for you (obviously) and they have defined “well for you” as delivering you the most traffic for as cheaply as possible. In practice, that means all your campaign budget will be focused on the best performing ads, ie, the ad that gets the most traction.

And the types of ads that do well skew towards “easy to fill roles” such as retail or admin jobs, as opposed to “hard to fill roles” such as Management Consultants, Technical SCRUM masters or C-Level types.

The problem is if you’re advertising a bunch of different roles (seniorities, industries etc) and you want to fill them, you want your budget spent evenly.

The solution

1. If you have mix of roles to fill, don’t just send them one feed. Split your jobs into different categories (by industry, location, seniority etc) and make one RSS / XML feed for each. Set up individual UTM codes for them too. This way, you can set individual budgets for each, as well as pause them when required.
2. Call your account manager! They have a hidden feature that only they can use called Click Balancing. It’s not available on your normal client dashboard so you need them to set it up for you. It lets you define the max total % of budget that any particular ad can get.

About me

I’m a Growth Marketer based in Sydney Australia. I love working with awesome start ups to help them grow into successful businesses.

If you have any questions, or would like to get in touch… well, get in touch!