• Guide

Keys to Building a Strong Job Ad Campaign

Campaign creation comes with a world of emotions. From excitement to frustration, building an advertising campaign takes research and consistent adjusting to make sure we reach a desired goal.

Advertising for jobs has a slight twist from traditional consumer advertising. The technology and types of media are a few steps behind the usual social media/digital advertising.

Not to worry any longer, we’re here to give some background on how to build a strong job ad campaign.

Let’s get it going.

The Scope of Your Campaign

Before we even click anything on the dashboard, a bit of prep work needs to be done. The most common questions we ask our Advertisers before starting a campaign are: how many jobs are you looking to advertise and what kind?

The reason we ask those two questions is to prepare a campaign proposal that’s a good fit for that amount of jobs and its current performance in the industry. For us, it’s about setting some expectations on how the job ads will perform.

Now before you approach your advertising channel be sure to have that information ready. It will share a clear picture of your campaign for the advertising channel to bring back relevant performance stats. Additionally, it speeds up the selection process of which advertising channel you are going to end up using.

Breaking Things up for Organization

Generally, it’s a good idea to keep things as specific as possible. We can do this when creating multiple campaigns to assign its own focus.

That way when campaigns run and performance data comes back, the numbers report will directly represent those set of ads. We can then use that same data to make changes on a macro-level to ensure our entire advertising process is optimized.

From our experience, a popular approach to campaign organization is to create separate campaigns based on job category. One campaign for Sales and Marketing jobs and another separate campaign for Engineering jobs.

We highly recommended this approach as the performance of specific job categories tend to have different environments for success. These factors could be based on similar ad campaigns or even trends of the audience. Let’s say our Sales job ads are doing well but our Engineering jobs aren’t. We can safely make adjustments to the entire campaign instead of having to edit individual ads.

Dividing campaigns by job category is a good suggestion while there are other options as well. Bottom line, split campaigns up into smaller groups to allow for more control and opportunities to improve performance.

Knowing the going price…

The foundation of job advertising runs on the bid price. Oftentimes, there isn’t a universal bid price that will work for all kinds of ads. As previously mentioned, there are a number of factors that play into what the going bid price for certain audiences will be.

Lower bid prices indicate it’s a smaller audience being targeted. This could be due to niche jobs where it’s relevant to a small crowd and/or there aren’t many existing ads related to it.

This is still a win-win situation for you as an advertiser and the advertising channel you will post on. You get to advertise for a cheaper price while the advertising network gets to fulfill an open opportunity by engaging an underserved audience.

High bid prices reflect the competitiveness for engagement and interactions with particular audiences. These situations involve there being a lot of similar ads attempting to attract the same audience. Now who will get their ad placed comes down to the highest bidder.

Moral of the story, bid prices are relative. Finding the right bid price will vary across channel providers as their networks, technology and services will differ as you window-shop.

Take the time to understand why bid prices for particular audiences sit at their current level. Is it due to volume, network reach or recent performance?

Building context behind your potential campaign will help set the right expectations for success.

Prepping for Launch

Let’s piece it all together. We’ve gathered information about the amount of jobs and what kinds, created different sets for campaigns and estimates about bid prices for each campaign.

Only thing that’s left is setting a budget and launching the campaign! Final stretch.

Luckily setting a budget is something you as an advertiser have the most control over. Since most advertising is performance-based, they look at budgets as “use it or lose it”.

This means if the advertising channel only uses half of the month’s budget, then that’s all you pay. If all of it is used then the campaign will stop and you can decide if it’s a good fit to assign more.

Budgets are a tool to help work within your means so being pragmatic is completely understandable. Keep in mind that there is a chance your campaign is really hot and gets used all in one day. Our advice – start small and grow as things progress. You can always add more budget.

A good question to ask with your advertising channel is about what safeguards are in place to keep spending spread out. Some offer these sorts of features, so it’s a good idea to know.

To cross the finish line take those four items: volume of jobs, campaign breakdown, bid prices and budget. Plug them into your advertising account and you’re good to go!

Live and Learn

The show has just begun. The campaign is live and being advertised to candidates. Performance data is going to creep in over time which will be essential to make adjustments in the future.

Use the data and analytics to assign proper budgets, bids and determine which jobs are a good fit. There will be fluctuations so let’s do our best to keep things steady growing.

Here, at JobAdX, we live and breathe job advertising where we enable you to do it programmatically carrying out these exact steps. Maybe our network has a home for you job ads, you can find out more info about it here.

These are keys to building strong job ad campaigns. Best of luck and happy hiring!