An article posted today on PaidContent.org discusses a survey conducted by CareerBuilder. The survey found that about 30% of hiring managers are using Facebook to do background checks on candidates. That beats the 26% number that said they used LinkedIn.

The article focuses on that disparity: If LinkedIn holds your online resume, why would employers pay more attention to Facebook? The answer seems to be that employers would like to know who you really are. LinkedIn has the cultured facade. That might look great, but employers also want to see the real you. That makes plenty of sense (and is a great reason to check your privacy settings and be carefull about the things you put online).

Now, it’s always interesting to hear about how employers are using social networks, but what’s really important is the conclusion the author, Tameka Kee, comes to near the end:  ”if employers are using the network to check up on candidates, maybe they’d want to pay to post job listings on Facebook as well. [original emphasis]”

Kee looks at this as an untapped potential revenue stream for Facebook. It certainly is that, but we like to think of it as an untapped audience for employers looking to find great candidates. And while Kee’s wording makes it sound like this is a theoritcal possibility, we know that it’s very real (and it works). We know because we’re doing it for our clients.

There are two main ways to advertise jobs on Facebook. One is through the marketplace, which has a jobs section and is actually powered by a third-party provider. The other is directly, using Facebook ads. The ads can be targeted to meet very specific criteria (age, gender, interests, education level, current employer, college, location, etc) and can send candidates directly to a particular job listing or simply to your career site. The possibilities are pretty wide open, and as the article notes, the opportunity is still largely untapped.

Google has announced the launch of an new version of Google Insights for Search. The main feature included in the update is the addition of forecasting. Since the original release of the tool, we have been able to see that certain queries show seasonal trends. ‘Skiing’ gets more searches in the winter, ’surfing’ in the summer, ‘Easter’ in the spring, etc. After conducting a thorough study of their own data, Google identified which keywords and categories are the most predictable and integrated that information into the tool.

Now, if you look up data for the keyword ‘basketball’, for example, the graph that’s generated will include a forecast that extends the line out an additional 12 months. The forecast data can be removed with a checkbox.

Aside from adding forecasting, here are a few other interesting things that the study unearthed:

• Over half of the most popular Google search queries are predictable in a 12 month ahead forecast, with a mean absolute prediction error of about 12%.
• Some categories have particularly high fraction of predictable queries; for instance, Health (74%),Food & Drink (67%) and Travel (65%).
• Some categories have particularly low fraction of predictable queries; for instance, Entertainment(35%) and Social Networks & Online Communities (27%).

A poll conducted by affiliate network LinkShare found that very few consumers had ever clicked an ad on a social network (just 4% of the 2000 polled). An article in the Telegraph about the study noted that while that may be true, Facebook has still signed deals with 83 of the top 100 advertisers in the US. While the study seems to indicate that interest in these sorts of ads is very low, their growing use among major brands seems to say otherwise.

As noted by multiple commentators in the article, low click-through-rates in these sorts of environments are to be expected. People are busy posting pictures and commenting on their friends’ latest updates. Most of them aren’t shopping. Still, with the right targeting and message, social network ads can be very effective. The ads are inexpensive, and when people do decide to pay attention, it is the right people who are looking.

Our own experience on Facebook seems to confirm this. Click-through-rates on Facebook ads are very low, especially when compared to search engine ads. It is reasonable to assume that among all the clutter of a social site like Facebook, people frequently just overlook, or ignore the ads. But when we do catch someone’s eye, we try to have something that’s relevant to them. Something that catches their interest and gets the click, without setting them up for a let down when they arrive on the advertiser’s site (if you promise free ponies in the ad, there better be a way to get free ponies on your site).

It can be a delicate balance, but it does work. We think that over time, advertisers will learn more about the things that will get a response on social networks and their ads will become more effective. Either that or Facebook will run out of money.

Yesterday, Twitter, Facebook, and few other social sites were affected by a distributed denial of service attack, causing the services to become sluggish at best and completely non-responsive at worst.  The online response was immediate as social-media junkies everywhere cried out in agony as they were forced to use less trendy communication tools such as phones, blogs, and email. While that must have been painful, it could have been worse, especially for the businesses who rely on those sites for their traffic.

That made us think about the wisdom of diversification. Social media is a hot topic right now, especially in recruiting. There’s no denying that these sites are full of opportunities for recruiters, opportunities that they should certainly pursue. But this attack reminds us that the web has limitations and dependencies, both real and virtual. Putting our eggs in just one or two baskets can leave us exposed when problems arise.

In our last post we talked about the traffic monster that is Google and how it would be silly to ignore it. While that is true, it is important to remember that Google can be a fickle beast. Many a site has seen their traffic drop to nothing as their top rankings suddenly sank to the bottom of the pile. A single-minded focus on getting top organic rankings on Google left those sites, and by extention their businesses, open to disaster. Likewise, linking all of your advertising/pr/sales/customer communication or whatever else to a specific social site is asking for trouble.

While it may involve more work to diversify, it would be foolish to do otherwise. For all we know, Twitter could be gone tomorrow.

When it comes to looking for work, today’s job seeker has more options than ever before. Not only are the traditional places still around, like newspaper classifieds, but the web has been flooded with an ever-increasing supply of new places to look. There are huge job boards, niche job boards, social job sites, employer’s career pages, and aggregators that try to list all of those jobs (in fact, there are enough of those to warrant the creation of an aggregator of the aggregators).

With all of those options on the table, it might seem strange that many people start their job search on the same site that they start every other search: Google. How many people, you ask? A lot of people. Possibly enough people for us to say most people.

We did some research using Google’s Keyword Tool, which provides estimated search volume numbers used for reference in creating PPC campaigns. The numbers we got back are pretty impressive. Here’s a few of the most popular queries (the numbers represent searches on Google and their Search Network for the month of June in the US only):

• jobs - 185,000,000
• CA jobs - 5,000,000
• manager jobs - 4,090,000
• part time jobs - 3,350,000
• engineer jobs - 2,740,000
• marketing jobs - 1,500,000
• construction jobs - 1,220,000
• healthcare jobs - 1,000,000

Just those 8 queries comprise over 200 million searches per month (by way of comparison, Compete.com reports that Monster.com had just over 40 million unique visitors in June). If you are an employer, recruiter, job board, or pretty much anyone else in the employment space, and you haven’t given some serious thought about your strategy to capture a piece of that action, you are missing an enormous opportunity.

It’s real. After 3 years of talks, negotiations, botched offers, exectutive replacements, rumors, alegations, and intrigue, Yahoo and Microsoft have finally settled on a deal. The link above is to the official press release that came out this morning. Here are the highlights:

“Microsoft will now power Yahoo! search while Yahoo! will become the exclusive worldwide relationship sales force for both companies’ premium search advertisers.”

“Advertisers will also benefit from scale and enjoy greater ease of use and efficiencies working with a single platform and sales team for premium advertisers.”

“The term of the agreement is 10 years.”

“Microsoft will acquire an exclusive 10 year license to Yahoo!’s core search technologies, and Microsoft will have the ability to integrate Yahoo! search technologies into its existing web search platforms”

Here’s the big one for search marketers: “Microsoft’s Bing will be the exclusive algorithmic search and paid search platform for Yahoo! sites.” In other words, PPC marketers will be able to run ads on Bing and Yahoo through Microsoft AdCenter. This will certainly give marketers more of an incentive to use the platform as it will gain significant volume and cut down on management time.

“Yahoo! will become the exclusive worldwide relationship sales force for both companies’ premium search advertisers.”

“Microsoft will pay traffic acquisition costs (TAC) to Yahoo! at an initial rate of 88% of search revenue generated on Yahoo!’s O&O sites during the first 5 years of the agreement.”

Full implementation is expected to take 2 years after regulatory approval. Hopefully the ad platform integration comes sooner, rather than later.

Boomtown and TechCrunch are reporting that Microsoft and Yahoo have finally come to terms on a search deal, albiet a much smaller one then had been anticipated. Reportedly, the deal will have Microsoft powering Yahoo’s search engine, while Yahoo will continue to sell the advertising. If true, this will have little direct impact on the PPC marketplace in terms of platform management. However, it would simplify the SEO world somewhat.

The official anouncement is expected within 24 hours and we’ll have more info here if it really does.

Click Forensics has released a report indicating that overall levels of click fraud declined in the last quarter compared to Q1 2009 and Q2 2008. The release suggests that the decline is largely due to increasing vigilance on the part of the many ad networks that are included in their sample. Traffic from the major search engines is also included in the sample, but those engines have led the market in terms of click fraud prevention for some time. It is the second and third-tier engines and smaller ad networks that are the main concern to advertisers.

While we wouldn’t take the numbers provided by Click Forensics as absolute truth, they are certainly a good indicator and a positive sign that the smaller networks are paying attention to advertiser needs. As advertising dollars flow to the web, many advertisers are branching out from the major search engines in a quest for lower aquisition costs and more targetted traffic. However, advertisers expect proactive click fraud filtering and will take dollars away from networks that cannot provide it.

Hitwise Analyst Heather Hopkins says that Hitwise data shows that traffic to paid listings is declining “at the expense of organic traffic”. She provides three sets of evidence to back up her claims:

• In the four weeks leading to May 9, 2009, paid traffic represented 7.25% of traffic to ‘All Categories’ of web sites. In the prior year, the percentage was 9.84%, a decline of 26%.
• Major categories follow this trend. ‘Travel Agencies’ was down 25%, ‘Insurance’ 22%, and ‘Retail 500′ 20%.
• Finally, brand name searches within these categories, like “orbitz”, “home depot”, and “usaa”, showed major declines.

She concludes that the decline is most likely due to cutbacks in spending due to the recession.

Ed Stevenson, writing at Econsultancy.com, takes issue with the report. He points out, for example, that while the percentage share of paid searches is shrinking, the universe of all searches is growing. It is therefore possible that a relative decline actually represents an absolute gain (i.e. 7% of 500 is more than 9% of 100).

He also argues that any real reductions are most likely the result of advertisers leaving the market (like Circuit City, and many other retailers who have closed), and continuing advertisers spending less on brand terms. We would argue that the differences in brand clicks have more to do with Google’s slow shift toward a more trademark friendly policy. Searches for many of the brands mentioned by Hitwise display no ads except the official brand. That is most likely because Google has blocked advertisers at the brand’s request rather than an economic issue.

Finaly, Mr. Stevenson notes that Google reported a slowdown in Q2 2009, but paid clicks were still up 15%. Perhaps marketers have cut back on their programs with Yahoo and Microsoft, but it seems that, for Google at least, reports of a decline in paid search are somewhat exagerated.

Relocation is expensive. In today’s market, a lot of employers would rather avoid relocation costs by hiring someone local. However, you’ll have a hard time finding the right local talent if your advertisements are being shown to a national audience, a common problem online. PPC advertising offers a simple solution to this problem.

All the major search engines offer the ability to target ads by location. Called geo-targeting, this feature allows you to show your ads only to searchers who are in the location you choose. Of course, that function is limited by the search engine’s ability to determine the searcher’s location, which isn’t perfect. It is good enough, however, to insure that the vast majority of your traffic is coming from the right place.

Here is a screenshot from the Google AdWords geo-targeting tool to give you an idea of the possibilities:

This view is zoomed in on the Los Angeles metro area (click for full size). As you can see, Google makes it simple to find and select the locations that are most relevant to your campaign, ranging from the entire country, all the way down to individual cities within a metro area. In fact, you can even target your ads to custom areas based on a set radius around a city or a shape that you define.

The flexibility of the system allows it to meet the needs of just about everyone. Campaigns may target multiple cities, states, or regions, or just one. For example, a company with one central office could target the surrounding 50 miles, while a national retailer could target all the cities that contain its stores.

If location, or relocation, is an issue for your company, geo-targeting may be the answer. It certinaly makes it easier to find the right talent in the right place.