Home : Newsletters : 2006 : October
The recent IAB / PwC online advertising revenue figures show that online advertising continues to grow rapidly and was valued at £917 million for the first six months of 2006 - this gives the internet an advertising market share of 10.5% (compared to press, TV etc) up from 7.3% for the first half of 2005.
Online recruitment classified advertising was worth £103 million in the first half of 2006 (compared to £94 million in the first half of 2005), but the fastest growing online medium continues to be Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising (also sometimes called paid for search or keyword sponsorship). PPC was valued at £531 million in H1 2006, meaning that PPC accounted for 58% of all money spent on online advertising.
The growth of PPC has been rapid, having almost tripled in value in the last two years
Value of PPC advertising (IAB / PwC)
Much of this growth is due to the clear benefits of PPC advertising - unlike banner advertising (where you pay for the advertisement whether or not it succeeds) with PPC (as the name suggests) you only pay for the traffic you receive, this means that PPC is a totally results based form of advertising, you can start driving traffic to your site for as little as 10p per click, you can manage your budget in real time to instantly respond to your changing needs (eg to a new recruitment instruction) and you can target very specific web users through the use of highly targeted keywords.
However, if you're using PPC to drive traffic to your careers site it's important that you attract the right type of candidate and don't pay to drive irrelevant users to your site. To this end our PPC team has put together five top tips to help you attract the right candidates and get better value for money from your search engine advertising campaigns.
Be creative - your ads should stand out from the competition. Make sure you include the search term within the title or body of the advertisement.
Use 'Phrase Match' and 'Exact Match' - this will lead to less impressions for your ads, but they will be more relevant and therefore increase your click thru rate.
Don't pay over the odds for the top spot - it's better to aim to have your ads displayed in positions two to four, this way you won't get sucked into an ego based bidding war just to get to number one.
Test and test again - try different ad copy, positions, keywords, match type and landing pages to evaluate what works and what doesn't.
Use targeted landing pages - the destination link in the advertisement should take visitors to the exact page you want them to visit, don't put unnecessary clicks between a visitor and the intended content.
It's easy to drive traffic to your site, but it's not easy to drive the right traffic to your site - these tips should help you achieve that.
Alternatively if you haven't got the time or resources to manage your PPC campaign then Enhance Media offers a fully managed PPC service. Our team are qualified Google Advertising Professionals and are here to help you use search engines to drive relevant and targeted candidates to your site. We currently manage PPC campaigns on behalf of a range of employers including a 'big four' accountancy firm, a major insurance company and one of the world's leading financial information organisations.
Click here for more information or call 0207 731 9642 for an informal consultation and to find out how Enhance Media could help drive targeted candidates directly to your site.