Recruitment Google Ads: 7 Tips for Exceptional Campaign Management

Recruitment advertising in Google Ads is the best way to target businesses and individuals that are searching for recruitment services and jobs. That’s because it helps you target people that are actively searching and this means the targeting is highly precise.

However, if you’re already running some Google Ads campaigns for your recruitment business, you may know some of the challenges involved in targeting the right audience and achieving a profitable account.

There are campaign management best practices to follow. These will help you to save time while also running an effective campaign. Follow the tips below to manage your campaign for exceptional results.

 

1. Setup conversion tracking

For your recruitment business to run effective Google Ads campaigns, you should make sure you have the correct tracking in place. This is not just to track clicks and impressions for your ads, but the actual enquiries and leads that you’re getting.

So, you should set up conversion tracking as soon as possible and even before you launch your campaign. And you can set this up within your account on the Conversions page in Tools & Settings and follow the instructions in there.

Also, consider setting up goal tracking in Google Analytics. This will help you to track all your traffic sources and not just your Google Ads traffic. And you can import these goals into your Google Ads account.

Visit the Admin page in Google Analytics and go to the Goals page and use one of the templates to create your goal tracking.

 

2. Add more negative keywords

As you run your Google Ads campaign you should continue to add negative keywords. This blocks searches that aren’t relevant for your business and ensures you achieve a high click through rate and conversion rate.

The search terms report in your campaign reveals the actual searches that your campaign is getting. And you should select all search queries that are not relevant and add them as negative keywords.

 

3. Check Recommendations

Recommendations is a page that shows opportunities to help improve your campaign. These are based on the machine learning system’s determination of how your campaign can be improved.

You should review each recommendation to see if it is relevant for your campaign. Some of the recommendations worth taking time to review carefully are keyword and bid strategy recommendations. That’s because these usually have a big impact on your campaign and if you apply the wrong ones, you will see a drop in performance.

Also, applying and dismissing the recommendations improves your Optimisation score. And this helps the system to send better targeted recommendations in the future.

 

4. Find new keywords

For your recruitment business to target the right searches in Google Ads, you should continue to look for more keyword opportunities. So, the Keyword Planner tool in your account will help you to research more keywords and then add the relevant ones.

Also, check the search terms report to find searches that are relevant but you haven’t added as keywords. The reason these will be appearing is because of keyword match types especially if you have phrase and broad match keywords.

However, adding them as keywords helps to improve ad performance because they can now appear in the ads especially if you use the dynamic keyword insertion (DKI) syntax. And you can set individual bids for them too.

 

5. Update bid strategy

The best Google Ads bid strategy in Google Ads for recruitment businesses depends on a number of factors. First, there are two main bid strategy types: automated and manual bidding.

For recruitment companies and many similar industries, an automated bid strategy is the best way to get started. And Maximise Clicks is one of the best to start with because it works to get as much click traffic as possible for your budget.

Later, as you manage your campaign, you can switch to another automated strategy or manual bidding. If you want more control over bids, then change to the Manual CPC bid strategy.

Or you can switch to another automated bid strategy to continue benefiting from auction-time bidding. For example, a Smart bidding strategy like Maximise Conversions will try to get you as many conversions as possible for a target cost per acquisition (tCPA).

 

6. Do competitor analysis

As a recruitment business running a Google Ads campaign, it’s important to do regular competitor research and analysis to see how competitors are performing. This analysis will help you to run better ads and campaigns and spend accordingly for better returns.

There are a few tools and reports that you can access to see the performance of other recruitment businesses. The first to check is the Auction Insights report in your campaign, that’s under the Ad Group tab. This shows what percentage of the available traffic you are getting, compared to others. And how often you rank in the top and absolute top positions compared to competitors.

The SERanking website has a tool that helps you carry out competitor research. It helps you to see what keywords other recruitment businesses have in their PPC campaigns and how much they spend on each on average.

 

7. Consider broad match type keywords

If you’ve been running your campaigns for a while now and want to increase search volumes, then adding broad match keywords would be helpful. Broad match keywords target a wider range of searches than phrase and exact match type keywords.

But, you should ensure that you have a good list of negative keywords to block any searches that are not relevant.

Also, broad match keywords are likely to drive long tail searches that usually have a higher conversion rate than short tail keywords.

 

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