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.