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.

Steve Woods, author of the book Digital Body Language, was one of the speakers at the Online Marketing Summit which was here in Cleveland on Monday. We learned quite a few interesting things at the event and thought we might share a little bit of that insight.

Steve’s area of expertise is B2B marketing, and in his presentation he talked a bit about today’s B2B buyer. We thought that the tips he gave might be helpful for someone who is marketing a B2B product or service online. For example, he gave the following (paraphrased) list of attributes about today’s buyer:

• Wants information on his or her own timeframe.
• Does not want to be sold to (but wants access to sales people when ready).
• Wants interaction, not marketing. Data is critical.
• Will likely interact with your brand/website multiple times before making a purchase decision.

Based on those points, here are some questions to consider about your site: What do you offer in the way of immediately available information? Is your info all locked up in white papers that require lots of personal information (and which will clearly result in a sales call when completed)? Does the customer have to schedule a demo in order to get anything more than a cursory amount of information about the product?

When you are thinking about these questions and how you might tailor your site and your materials to meet your prospect’s needs, remember that they are going through a process. As Steve described it, the process is as follows (with our interpretation in parenthesis):

• Recognition (this is where your PPC campaign helps prospects realize that you exist)
• Evaluate (key time to provide easy access to information about the product/service)
• Sample (now the prospect is ready for a demo, or to trade their info for more detailed specs, etc.)
• Integrate (now the sales team is involved and from here it’s about follow-through)
• Test (the soon-to-be customer is trying things out)
• Deploy (you have a customer)

The goal of your website should be to help prospects make their way through this process. Prospects are unlikely to give information that will lead to sales calls at the outset. They need to know more about your offering to see if it is worth that kind of commitment. As they learn more about the product they will become more likely to trade their contact info for more detailed information such as a demo.

This is the kind of information that is good to keep in mind as you are designing landing pages for your marketing campaigns. It will also help you evaluate  the success of the campaigns. From a PPC perspective, you might expect broad keywords to bring visitors who are more interested in the materials meant for early stage prospects. That is where they should be directed. More specific, niche keywords might correspond to more advanced prospects who might be willing to sign up for a demo or white paper. Again, the landing page should reflect that.

As your campaign progresses, your analytics should guide your decisions. After all, that is where you will find the clues to your prospect’s digital body language.

From what we have seen over the years, the question of ad group structure is something that many PPC advertisers struggle with as they are setting up new campaigns. The main question seems to be, which keywords should I put where? Some questions that stem from that are: How many keywords is too many for one ad group? If I break my keywords up into smaller groups, on what criteria do I base the groupings? We’d like to share our ad group philosophy and hope that it can help answer those questions.

Google’s learning center suggests that “ad groups should be organized by common theme, product, or goal”. What the themes are, and what groups you end up with, will be determined by your keywords. Ad groups should be comprised, as much as possible, by keywords that share a close resemblance to one another. That generally means that all of the keyword phrases in the group will share certain words. For example:

• Cleveland marketing agency
• Cleveland marketing company

In those phrases, two out of the three words are the same. In addition, the phrases mean essentially the same thing. That’s a good sign that they belong together. If you are not sure whether a keyword belongs with a certain group, a good question to ask is: Will the ad copy for this group address this keyword? If not, it probably belongs in another group. In the same way that your keyword phrases in the ad group should share words, your ad copy should too. For example:

• pay per click marketing agency
• pay per click advertising agency
• recruitment advertsing

There are a few ways to analyze this group, but generally speaking your ad copy for this group would be focused on the words ‘pay per click’, ‘marketing’, ‘advertising’, and ‘agency’. While it might be possible to work the word ‘recruitment’ into your ad, it probably makes sense to put that in a separate group. The distinction would likely be clearer in a real campaign because you would probably have several other ‘recruitment’ keywords which would fit together.

Another guideline that will help you make grouping decisions is the number of keywords you have in the group. Google says, “If you find that the keywords or placements in one ad group become unwieldy, split the ad group into two to make them easier to manage.” Our interpretation of this guideline is that when it comes to ad groups, smaller and tightly focused is better than large and inclusive. That doesn’t mean that you should be creating hundreds of tiny ad groups with three keywords in each. However, if your group is getting into the hundreds of keywords, you should probably look for a way to break it up.

Once your campaign is live, a good way to see if you have created a strong ad group structure is to check your keywords’ quality scores. An ad group that has a lot of keywords with a low quality score may be an ad group that needs reorganization. In some cases, the keywords that relate well to each other and to your ad copy will have higher q-scores while the outliers will have lower scores. Moving the low scoring keywords into more relevant ad groups (or getting rid of them altogether) should help improve the performance of the core keywords in the group.

While ad group creation is a fuzzy science, we hope that answers some of the most common questions. As always, if you have questions about your ad group structure, or any other aspect of your PPC campaigns, we would love to help.

How do you find the sites that your target audience is using? Google Ad Planner offers a good place start.

Ad Planner makes it easy to define your target audience using filters like gender, age, household income, education, and location. There is a convenient list of pre-defined audiences which you can select. In addition you may add ’sites visited’ or ‘keywords searched’ into your audience filters. As you ad or change filters, the list of suggested sites updates automatically. According to Google, the data used to drive the matching system comes from “a variety of sources, such as aggregated Google search data, opt-in anonymous Google Analytics data, opt-in external consumer panel data, and other third-party market research”.

Once your audience definitions are in place, it’s time to set some site filters. The site filter allows you to restrict your search to sites that accept advertising (of any form), or to sites within the Google Content Network (or both, or neither). You may also choose to see only sites from specific categories (you can choose multiple), as well as domain extensions. From there you can further refine your site selection by the type and/or size of ads they show.

With your filters all set, you should have a sizable list of sites that Google deems relevant to your target audience. What we’ve found, however, is that these lists tend to favor large, heavily trafficked sites. In some cases that is exactly what we’re looking for, but it’s often the case that we would prefer to find smaller, more niche sites. While it is likely that highly educated females between the ages of 25 and 54 who are in the medical field do visit usnews.com, a whole lot of other people do too. We need something a bit more focused.

One way to bubble up the niche sites is to sort the list by the Comp Index. The Comp Index reports the concentration of your selected audience relative to all users in your defined country. The higher the comp index, the more likely that an ad impression on a given site will be seen by someone in your target audience. The list can be sorted in a number of ways by clicking on labels across the top of the sites list, but there are also 3 preset sorting arrangements that are available in the upper right corner where the number of results is listed. Experiementing with those might reveal some winners.

From here you can pick and choose the sites your think are most valuable and then save your list into a media plan, or export the results to a CSV. You can also visit sites in the list, or expand listings to get more info. This is sometimes a good idea because the categorization is not always perfect. For example, a recent list we pulled up contained the site Mainstreet.com, a news site with a focus on business and financial stories. Google had it listed under “Astrology & Divination”. Close, but not quite.

So now you have a good idea of where to find your audience. All you have to do is get there.

When marketers think about Facebook they usually think about things like profile pages, getting fans, and maybe even making an app. Successfully implemented, those avenues can offer a very high level of user engagement and make a great addition to a company’s marketing mix. However, there is another way to reach the many millions of Facebook users which is often overlooked.

Facebook Ads

Facebook’s self-serve advertising system can be a great way to reach a uniquely targeted audience. The ads can drive traffic to a page or group inside of Facebook, or to an external site (such as your job listings). In addition, the ads can be purchased on a pay-per-click basis or the more traditional CPM pricing model. That makes it easy to get the results you’re looking for whether you are a direct or a brand marketer.

The key feature of Facebook ads, however, is not the pricing. It’s the targeting. Ads can be targeted by any, or all, of the following top-level criteria:

• Location
• Age
• Sex
• Keywords
• Education
• Workplace
• Relationship Status
• Relationship Interests
• Languages

In some cases there are additional sub categories available. Education, for example, allows you to target all people who are ‘in college’, or to further refine that group by specifying up to 20 colleges by name. That seems ideal for a regional employer who’s looking for new grads from the top local universities.

The information used to target the ads comes from user’s profiles and, as in the case of location, other factors such as their IP address. These targeting options offer unique opportunities for employers and recruiters. The ability to specifically reach people inside of a target organization, such as a competitor, goes beyond the capabilities of a search engine or job board. The potential applications here are numerous and, we think, pretty exciting. So the next time you’re thinking about adding Facebook to your marketing lineup, don’t forget about Facebook ads.

If you’d like to talk in more detail about what Facebook ads could do for your organization, don’t be afraid to send us an email or drop us a line. We’d love to talk with you.

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.

We spotted a great article today on iMedia Connection that outlines three excellent reasons to invest in search advertising during a downturn. We’d like to repeat those reasons here with an added focus on the recruiting industry.

Reason number 1 stood out as particularly important: “Holding steady in search means you’ll remain top-of-mind with consumers hunting for deals”. A downturn is a great time to pick up market share. It’s a fair bet that many of your competitors have decided to lay low for a while. Some may have dropped out of the game entirely. But customers, or in our case, candidates, are still out there searching. In fact, they may be searching now more than ever.

The article quotes David Hallerman from eMarketer as saying that “customers are going to search engines because they are looking for better deals.” This holds true in the recruiting space, but might make more sense if it read, “candidates are going to search engines because they need to find jobs.” More Americans out of work means more people searching for jobs. Now is your chance to grab the top talent that other employers had to let go because of cut-backs, as well as to position yourself as a top-tier employer in your industry.

Let’s take a look at reason number 2: “Buying search ads now builds a history with the engines, meaning you’ll pay less per click over time.” As explained in the article, this reason has a lot to do with the concept of Quality Score. The major search engines all use a rating system to help them determine how their ads should be ranked (and how much the advertisers should have to pay to be there). These systems are largely based on the performance of the ads - more clicks tends to lead to a higher score.

Building a strong history of performance is an important part of search engine marketing. What a downturn offers to you as an advertiser is the chance to build your history at a time when there are fewer competitors and lower costs. This is doubly true for recruiting since many companies have yet to add search engines to their recruitment marketing mix. You can be sure that when the good times start rolling again they will take an interest. By that time, however, you will be entrenched (and therefore costly to compete against).

Here’s the final reason from the article: “Increasing your investment in data ultimately provides greater ROI.” This reason is closely related to the second in that it will help lower costs over time and put you in a better position down the road. Search marketing campaigns and their associated tracking systems generate a lot of great data. A comprehensive search campaign can tell you a lot about your target market: Where they tend to gather online, how they search, what messages resonate with them, etc. This data can be used to make your campaigns more efficient, bringing in more applicants for the same, or even less, amount of money.

You can, of course, learn from your PPC campaigns any time, recession or not. However, it will probably be much cheaper to do it now. In addition, having that knowledge available gives you that much more of an edge when the search market starts heating up again.