According to Recruiter.com, over 70% of all job searches begin on Google, which can mean two things for your staffing firm. One, if your brand doesn’t have a strong presence on Google, you’re missing out on a ton of potential candidates. Two, if you are promoting yourself on Google in the right places, you’ve essentially granted yourself a license to print money.
However, after auditing hundreds of Google Ads accounts over the last seven years from the hundreds-of-dollars-a-month to the million-dollars-a-year spenders, I’ve come to find that most people advertising on Google haven’t yet tapped into this money printer. They’re running campaigns that target the wrong people, wasting money and ultimately underperforming relative to the competition. In this article, I’ll share the top three mistakes staffing firms make with their Google Ads and walk you through how to fix them!
Improper Conversion Tracking
If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it. Conversion tracking allows staffing firms to measure the effectiveness of their campaigns and determine the return on investment (ROI). Without proper conversion tracking set up across your website and landing pages, your campaigns are doomed to fail from the start. By tracking your conversions, you can understand which ads and keywords are driving the most valuable actions and candidate applications.
Ensure that your conversion tracking code is set up properly — or install your tracking code if you haven’t already — so that you can start to understand if your money is truly driving a return.
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Poor Keyword Selection Strategy
With the sheer number of keywords that could bring up your site in a Google search, it can be hard to determine which should you use. And to make things worse, there are different “match types” that lead to even more keyword variations that you could have within your account. But still, the keywords that you choose to select for your campaigns will determine what your ads show up for and how your budget is spent.
Most people in the staffing space are simply targeting too many keywords. This leads to poor candidate targeting and ad budgets wasted on keywords that were doomed to fail from the start. Fixing this issue is easy, however, because you can simply follow the Google Ads rule of thumb to limit the number of keywords to 8-20 per campaign.
No Post-Click Consideration
What happens after a searcher clicks on your ad? In the staffing space, I’ve seen that most people advertising on Google haven’t taken what happens post-click into consideration. That’s why they send their traffic to one of three places — typically, to the homepage of your website, to a job board within your website or to a dedicated landing page. There are different rationales behind each strategy, but in an ideal world, you send your search to the most relevant page on your website possible — which often isn’t your homepage. In addition, a job board largely won’t be relevant, as it also provides too many options. Sending traffic to unique landing pages, however, will allow you to improve campaign conversions, track results more effectively, provide a better search experience and increase your quality score on Google.
My recommendation for every staffing firm advertising on Google is to send your traffic to a landing page. You’ll receive higher quality scores, and the people who click on your ad will land exactly on what they were looking for, making them more likely to convert and less likely to bounce away from your page.
Wrapping It Up
How you set up your Google Ads campaigns can be the difference between having a money printer or a money pit. Given that so many candidates start their job searches on Google, it only makes sense to get these ad campaigns dialed in to maximize ROI and turn your Google Ad dollars into new revenue for your business.