I’m often engaged in heated debate with potential clients on how ads on Google are ranked and how we can ensure that ads are displayed at the top of page one on Google.  

Well firstly I just want to clear up one common misconception about Google Adwords.  

- The amount of money you spend on Google will affect how OFTEN your ads are viewed, but NOT necessarily how HIGH up the page your ads are ranked. 

So how can we ensure that ads are prominently displayed? A keyword-targeted ad is ranked on a search result page based on the matched keyword’s cost-per-click (CPC) bid and Quality Score.

Ad Rank = CPC bid × Quality Score

The Quality Score for Ad Rank on Google and the search network is determined by:

• 1. The historical clickthrough rate (CTR) of the keyword and the matched ad on Google
• 2. Account history, which is measured by the CTR of all the ads and keywords in your account
• 3. The historical CTR of the display URLs in the ad group
• 4. The relevance of the keyword to the ads in its ad group
• 5. The relevance of the keyword and the matched ad to the search query
• 6. Your account’s performance in the geographical region where the ad will be shown
• 7. The relevancy of the landing page 

When we run a report in Google, scores (1-10) are attributed to every keyword so that we can see which ads are performing well and which ads need reworking. Good news for us all!     

Admittedly this is last week’s news http://www.broadbean.com/issues/news/256-14/dmgt-acquires-broadbean.html. But it has got me thinking… 

1. Will all the other job boards (not owned by DMGT) now reconsider linking to Broadbean? After all one of their major competitors will now have access to all their response data and more.  

2. Will this allow another independent provider in the market to establish themselves?  

The short answers to the above are: Yes and No.  

Personally I am not convinced on the long-term validity of third party multi-posting software. My reasons being:  

1. Unless you are recruiting across a huge variety of roles and sectors, you shouldn’t be advertising on more than 3-4 job boards. Now admittedly this is unhelpfully ambiguous, but you get my point I hope.  

2. The search engines of all job boards work differently. Ideally you should tailor your copy to each individual job board. There isn’t a one size fits all.  

There is already a trend we are seeing where companies are spending more money on job board advertising, but that spend is being concentrated across fewer job boards. As the market matures I also anticipate that more companies will invest in their own applicant tracking and candidate management systems, these systems should provide their own multi-posting functionality.   It will be interesting to see where we are this time next year. But I can’t see the likes of Totaljobs and Monster being very happy about Jobsite having access to all their response data.   

Linkedin.com seems to be adding functionality by the day; it is a site I am using more and more as an investigative tool but also as a networking tool.

I have recently started some discussions on the NORAS Group on Linkedin. We welcome everyone to join the Group and enter into the discussions. NORAS is there to provide independently audited job board data to the recruitment and HR community, the Group on Linkedin.com will (hopefully) provide everybody with the forum to air their views and exchange ideas and best practice in the industry.

The join the group click here - NORAS Group on Linkedin

Saw this very interesting post on the Jobsgopublic Blog…

http://blog.jobsgopublic.com/2008/10/17/has-traditional-recruitment-advertising-ever-changed/

Amazing that in 216 years the classified print ad really hasn’t evolved, at all!

I’ve been writing a lot recently about the IAB / PwC spend figures that show online recruitment advertising in the UK was worth £195 million in the first six months of 2008 and have just realised that this equates to more than £1 million per day. Very exciting. All of a sudden this seems like quite a lot - £1 million spent on UK job boards every day, wow! Read more about the IAB research here.

The Masterclass, held on the 25^th July at the Royal Geographical Society in London, was the first annual half day masterclass in Enhance Media’s arsenal of training services. Within days of the tickets being on sale, the Masterclass quickly sold out.

Being such a great event I’ve decided to give a very quick roundup of the half day’s events:

Enhance Media’s own Tim Elkington first delved into the world of the average online job seeker before Ben Wood (Head of Recruitment Channel for Google) discussed the different aspects of targeting the average online jobseeker through Search Engine Marketing. Simon Kelly, the Director of Corporate Solutions for Europe from LinkedIn, then told us how we can target online job seekers though LinkedIn followed by Jez Langhorn, the Head of Talent at McDonalds, who discussed McDonalds’ new careers website and the benefits of having a tailored site for the employee. The Sales Director of Educate, Richard Badley, closed the seminar by educating us on the do’s and don’t’s when targeting online jobseekers through various social media platforms, blogs and forums like Bebo, Facebook and Myspace.

Please feel free to have a look at some of the pictures from the Masterclass in our Photo Gallery.

Great news for all those who have booked on our Masterclass, apologies to all those who wanted to attend but missed out.

Our Masterclass on 24th July has sold out

http://www.enhancemedia.co.uk/services/training/open.php?pid=15

We will be running our annual “Online recruitment - The year ahead” conference in January next year, we will obviously keep you posted.

I will literally be able to say “Book now to avoid disappointment”!!

Cheesey!

Latest figures out from www.hitwise.co.uk…

Google search properties accounted for an incredible 87 percent of all UK searches for the four weeks ending 31 May 2008, increasing by 12 percent compared to May 2007.

In comparison, Yahoo! search properties accounted for 4.09 percent of UK searches in May 2008, a 2 percent increase compared to April 2008.

MSN search properties accounted for 3.72 percent and Ask search properties accounted for 3.07 percent of searches. MSN increased 2 percent compared to April 2008 and Ask increased 6 percent.

Amazing.

Last night the NORAS glitterati descended on the Sports Cafe in a sea of wii, lager and carbohydrate rich food to fight to be the NORAS 2008 Pool Champions - ‘the biggest prize in online recruitment’.

The group stages were complicated and saw the elimination of GAAPweb, Secs in the City, Osborne Brook (who built the NORAS website) and ABCe. The knock out stages then followed

Quarter finals

Enhance Media beat 1JOB.co.uk

reed.co.uk beat Guardian Jobs

Eteach.com beat Times Online - Jobs

jobs.telegraph.co.uk beat Leisure Jobs

Semi finals

Enhance Media beat reed.co.uk

jobs.telegraph.co.uk beat Eteach.com

Final (best of 3)

jobs.telegraph.co.uk beat Enhance Media (2-0)

Thanks to ABCe who co-hosted the event with us. Highlights included Dylan’s magnificent pot of the black to eliminate Secs in the City (last year’s champions), Eteach.com (real dark horses of the night), the dogged determination of Leisure Jobs and of course AJ and Freddie from jobs.telegraph.co.uk who took the big prize.

Back on May 23rd 2007 we predicted that the internet would be the biggest recruitment advertising medium in the UK by 2008. We were wrong, and think it will take until at least 2009.

All this is based on AA, IAB and WARC recruitment advertising revenue figures and our predictions for the future. Since the last prediction we’ve had the actual figures for 2007 in and they show that press recruitment advertising (in particular regional press) declined at a slower rate last year than we expected it to. We’ve revised the predictions for future recruitment advertising revenues - they can be seen here you can also compare these predictions to the previous year’s graph.

We’ve used average rates of change over the last couple of years and as you’ll see it now shows that online revenues will exceed trade press revenues this year and regional press revenues next year. Let us know what you think and expect another prediction based on the 2008 figures this time next year.