The battle lines are re-drawn, the finger is on the metaphorical trigger, the 5^th of May is just around the corner. If you haven’t reviewed your PPC advertising campaign, you should.

As of the 5^th of May 2008, Google are easing their search rules, letting anyone bid on copyright keywords and phrases and a great deal of major companies intend to bid on their rivals’ names and even products’ names. These rule changes will bring Google in the UK in line with Google in the U.S as they have been doing this for the past 4 years. It’s not quite the free-for-all everyone may picture though, as any of your copyright terms will still be banned from being included in your competitions adverts.

Still, to ensure you rank above your competitors for your brand terms, you would have to ensure your “quality score” is good while you might have to increase your existing bid. You should:

        (a) Ensure your adverts are accurate, and try including the copyright terms in the advert copy,

        (b) Ensure your landing page is search engine “friendly”, keyword rich and relevant.

        (c) Have a good CTR (Click-through rate), as this is one factor that will help ensure a higher “quality score” and, in theory, a lower cost.

It is always best to speak to an expert, or even Google, if you are unsure about what you can and can’t do - as Google will “punish” those breaking their “ever-changing” rules.

Firstly, if you are not familiar with the search engine layout: when you search for something, the results page will appear with “sponsored links” at the top and to the right. In the middle (under and to the left of the sponsored links) are your “natural” or “organic” listings.

Quite simply, PI (or Paid Inclusion) is where a company would pay a search engine to be listed in their “natural” or “organic” results page listings among the normal results.

This often works on a pay-per-click basis or an annual fixed price. Most search engines offer this (and have been for many years) with exceptions like Google, ASK, MSN.

Eyebrows have been raised over whether this is right or wrong and whether it would be best keeping a natural listing just that - natural and free.

In theory, PI does not guarantee that a company’s site will be listed above any other sites’. It should just allow indexing of your site (or just the pages you wish to index) to be done on a more frequent basis instead of having to wait for the search engine spiders to crawl your site naturally.

As announced the other day, the IAB / PwC online advertising spend research shows that the value of online advertising in the UK was £2.8 billion for 2007, this gives the internet a 15.3% market share for all ad budget spent in 2007 (making it third behind press display 19.9% and TV 21.8%).

The IAB also break down the £2.8 billion into the various different online advertising formats, the highlights of these are

- Paid for search listings - £1,619 million
- Banners - £467 million
- Consumer classifieds - £297 million
- Recruitment classifieds - £287 million
- Everything else (email ads, tenancies etc) - £143 million

Online classified revenue has grown in the following way over the last four years

H2 2007 - £145 million (2007 = £287 million)
H1 2007 - £142 million
H2 2006 - £112 million (2006 = £215 million)
H1 2006 - £103 million
H2 2005 - £88 million (2005 = £182 million)
H1 2005 - £94 million
H2 2004 - £67 million (2004 = £121 million)
H1 2004 - £54 million

So, not quite the £300 million that we were predicting for 2007 (we must update that graph!), but not bad. Given the current economic climate it’ll be interesting to see the figures for H1 2008, they should be out in approximately October this year.

Some great news from the IAB last night…

“Online advertising has grown from being the smallest market sector in 2003 to the third largest in 2007, with a new high of £2,812.6 millions. This represents a 38% year-on-year like-for-like increase, taking the medium to a market share of 15.3% (up from 11.4% in 2006).”

The full results are published on Thursday. Here at Enhance Media we predicted that the online recruitment market would be worth £300m

For your chance to win a very special, limited edition “Howeru” t-shirt! Go to Tim’s blog and make your prediction.

This isn’t a football score, but a result from the ‘Great British e-test’, the findings of which we’ve published today. The actual figures showed that those living in Central London are the most e-savvy in the UK and have an average e-score of 72.9 (out of 100) and that people living in Torquay have an average e-score of 49.4, making Torquay the least e-savvy town in the UK. Here’s what Sky News and WebUser have to say about the results.

You can buy the results of the Great British e-test as a pdf for £49 + VAT here - the results booklet includes some great data on UK internet users and compares the demographic profiles of people that have completed 30 different online activities (including applying for a job, writing a blog, using social networking sites etc) and you can take the e-test that generates findings for the research here.

Why don’t companies have their telephone number on their website?? I just don’t get it.

I think every site that carries any sort of job content should have a telephone number on it. I know that some corporates are reluctant to do this for fear of being bombarded with telephone calls from recruitment consultancies, but you can provide an area of the site that deals with this. Astra Zeneca does this very well…

http://www.astrazeneca.co.uk/azcareers/faqs/agency.asp
You will be missing out on candidates who aren’t completely confident using the web. The results from NORAS 2008 showed that 16% of candidates who saw a job online applied offline. Now this maybe because they had to apply offline, but could also be that they are not as confident applying online.

Being experienced internet users we can take this for granted. The internet can be a very impersonal place, sticking a telephone number of your site can help alleviate this perception.

I ran one of our Effective e-recruitment courses (BTEC Level 2 Intermediate Award, since you ask!) yesterday. And very enjoyable it was too.

I love running these courses, they really bring me back down to earth. Many of us in the industry (me included) can get far too carried away in talking about emerging technologies, blogs, podcasts, rss feeds and a whole plethora of cool and wacky online recruitment techniques which to be honest only the minority are using.

Yesterday we got back to basics and talked about a simple 5 stage process in developing a really effective and comprehensive online strategy.

Stage 1 - Develop your careers site

Stage 2 - Invest in a candidate management system

Stage 3 - Develop an effective job board strategy

Stage 4 - Develop a search engine marketing strategy

Stage 5 - Target industry, lifestyle and regional related sites to attract “passive” candidates back to your career site

Next week I am going talk in more detail on each of these stages and hopefully pass on some useful tips in keeping it simple and getting the basics right.

We’ve finally put the video on YouTube of us testing new questions for How ‘e’ are you? at our recent conference, you can see it on our YouTube channel (not quite the BBC, but a start) or watch it below.

Those of you that came to the conference will have experienced the excitement of testing some new questions for ‘How e are you?‘ live at the event in the style of ‘Ready, steady, cook’ - if you weren’t at the conference then you can see what we’re talking about on flickr.

We asked the audience if they had or hadn’t performed five online activities and after careful examination, here are the results

Have you ordered a takeaway online?
Yes - 33%
No - 67%

Have you booked a holiday online?
Yes - 98%
No - 2%

Have you obtained an insurance quote online?
Yes - 87%
No - 13%

Have you downloaded a podcast
Yes - 68%
No - 32%

Have you downloaded a TV programme / film to watch later?
Yes - 54%
No - 46%

We’ll do a fancy page on the site that shows the photos from the voting next week and upload the video to YouTube once we’ve edited a bit. We’ll also add some of these questions to the How e are you site. Interesting results - looks like people that come to online recruitment conferences love booking holidays online!
 

We ran our annual conference last Friday looking at the key issues facing the online recruitment industry in the next 12 months - you can see some of the photos we took of the day on flickr.

A couple of key topics for me were the principles of engagement with social media that Paul Harrison spoke about, for example - searching for Sainsburys on Facebook produces some amazing (and worrying) results and how employers deal with this kind of coverage in terms of their internal and external employer brands is a difficult question that certainly needs addressing.

I’d also never thought of categorising social media sites in the way that Josie did - understanding the differences and similarities between sites like YouTube, flickr and LinkedIn can help employers unravel the best way to engage with social networks and take advantage of these new properties as recruitment tools.

If you attended, it would be great to find out the other issues that you found interesting - please leave a comment and let us know.