PPC on the brain

I admit it…I'm somewhat of a data geek. My background is in Information Technology (with a twist of marketing and sales thrown in), and I love to delve in to the nitty-gritty of things to see if there's a problem to be solved, or some magical formula that will generate more hits, more jobseekers, more resumes, more revenue. Today was "PPC day" at JobCircle.com - we did a bunch of cool analysis and strategy planning around our vertical search jobs distribution and PPC efforts. I've got PPC on the brain.

As many job boards do, we rely partially on PPC as part of our strategy (yes, we still buy radio and TV and print and maybe someday a stadium) for getting talent to our site. However, as the world of job distribution and PPC becomes increasingly crowded, the job of determining ROI becomes increasingly difficult. In the beginning, there was Indeed. Then, as the buzz about PPC grew and capital started flowing into the vertical search space, combined with the growing success of the Google Adwords program and Overture, it really started getting on people's radar. Now, there are quite a number of PPC sites in the space - TopUSAJobs.com, SimplyHired, GoJobs, JobAlot, Job.com - just to name a few.

These vertical search sites are constantly changing and adapting. Automated bidding CPC models, pay per applicant, pay per click, pay per resume…every site has a different angle to take your 15 cents, making the job of evaluating sites event more difficult….they'll sort your jobs to the top of the list for 75 cents, highlight them for 50 cents…if we're not careful, we could blow $50K a month on this stuff. And have no clue of what type of ROI we're getting. Recently, we've spent a fair amount of time building methods to start really evaluating and measuring our PPC expenditures, and it is helping us to be a better PPC purchaser. Do our customers care? Not really, they just want resumes in the database and applicants for their jobs.

So, the real question in the PP* world is: What is an online job applicant worth? How about a bona-fide jobseeker who joins the site? $2.00? $4.75? Back in the day, we estimated that if we could get a resume for $15, it was a good deal. Now, if we pay more than $2.50, are we paying too much?

The other big question is: In 5 years, will employers eventually understand and embrace this model, or will job boards still be the predominant source of jobs and revenue for these aggregators? Take a site like GetTheJob.com - they scrape ton of direct-hire jobs, thanks to their merger with EmployOn, who has strong expertise in spidering career sites of companies. But, converting those scraped jobs from free to fee must be a real challenge, considering that 70% of the employers I talk to have never heard of many of the large players in the space. They really don't understand (or seem to care) how a using a PPC model or distributing their corporate jobs to a vertical search site can help draw more traffic to their corporate career portal (Note to corporate recruiters: Make all of your job listings freely available as an XML file on your corporate site so these sites can bring you more free traffic and job boards can spider your jobs easier).

The third big question is: How do we know if these clicks are real jobseekers, and not sitting in a warehouse somehwere in China? What types of audit tools do these vendors have in place to qualify to prevent click fraud? A recent review of our log files showed that one of the biggest vertical search sites logged pushed 3000 clicks to us - all from one IP - it was clearly a bot on their end. Yikes.

There's no doubt that aggregators and their free/PPC models have helped the smaller boards compete with the larger boards by making eyeballs and traffic affordable. But someday, will jobseekers and employers skip the job boards and go right to the vertical search sites instead? Without huge offline branding expenditures, it is probably unlikely in the near future.

As one owner of a PPC site said to me the other day: "There are really only about 35 job board customers that are actively playing in the PPC space, and many employers still don't get it. It can be a tough business to really make money." It may be many more years before we see employers understand and embrace this new model. It will be exciting to watch, indeed.