Last week Google released a whitepaper discussing the CPA (cost-per-action) trends on their Content Network. For those who aren’t familiar with Google’s Content Network, it’s essentially a giant ad network made up of news, topical, blog, and other sites who have all signed up for Google’s program. Once approved, these sites can display Google’s ads which are targeted based on the content of each page. If users click on the ads, the sites get a share of the payment. It’s an ingenious system, but advertisers have sometimes been wary of it due to concerns about the quality of the traffic it generates.

Perhaps looking to address these concerns, Google conducted a large-scale evaluation of their advertiser’s performance on the Content Network. They found that average cost-per-action on the Content Network was comparable, and sometimes better, than that of search campaigns. While the report is obviously self-serving, we have to admit that the methodology seems sound and the data speaks for itself.

While the CPA metric might not be best for retail advertisers who are looking for the actual sales value to calculate an ROI, it works very well for recruiting. Rather than selling a product, the majority of recruitment campaigns focus on getting applications and would therefore be measured on a CPA basis. That makes Google’s findings all the more interesting.

We feel that Google’s Content Network presents a unique opportunity for recruiting. The main difference between a search campaign and a content campaign is user intent. In a search campaign, users are actively looking for something. In this case, a job. They are active job seekers. On the content network, most users are in browsing mode. They are visiting news sites, blogs, forums, industry journals, and social sites. Visitors to these sites are the coveted passive candidates. Access to that group, or targeted subsets of it, may be the Content Network’s greatest benefit.

But wait, there’s more! The Content Network also includes many job sites, large and small (niche, if you prefer). This gives us yet another way to reach active job seekers. We can target specific sites within the network or cast a wider net across a relevant area. If we find that some sites don’t perform the way we thought they would, we can remove them from our list (a tactic that Google recommends in their report).

Basically, we think that the Content Network holds some untapped potential, especially for recruiting. With careful campaign planning and the right ad copy techniques, not to mention a watchful eye and continual optimization, it could be just as effective as search advertising. Just like Google says.