< Back l Next > (Online ReTargeting? continued)
Job applicants “shop” for jobs in much the same way. Consider that in recruitment advertising, a lot of money is spent on things like search engine optimization and marketing, job boards, banner advertising on industry sites, email – etc. Online advertising is key to your ability to drive qualified candidates to your site. Investing in these programs is an important part of your success as it casts a wide net to attract qualified prospects.
Yet too often, the people who come to your site leave without learning more about your company, watching your video or delivering a resume or an application. All the money spent driving candidates to your website is lost.
Why is retargeting important?
Retargeting can enhance an advertising campaign by generating higher conversion rates, and lower customer acquisition costs. Most importantly, retargeting allows you to maintain a relationship with visitors who may have otherwise been lost.
With retargeting you can…
- Lower acquisition costs – target only people who have visited your site
- Reach visitors who left your site by advertising on their favorite sites
- Maximize ad effectiveness with ads based on visitor behavior
- Develop Brand Affiliation by associating your brand with your visitors’ other interests.
And what about those who did leave a resume or application? How valuable would it be to have continued dialogue with them after they leave your career site?
Retargeting allows you to recapture their attention, those who applied and those who didn’t, and re-message them by sending them either back to:
- Your Career Website
Or redirecting them to:
- Your Landing Page, where they could be surveyed
- Employee Testimonials, where they could hear from people they would work with
- Videos that could talk about the company and tell a story
- Industry News – maybe something innovative your company was involved with or an award you won
The point is, retargeting allows you to communicate with your candidates the way you would like to – if you had the time.
It gives you the opportunity to make your advertising investment pay off by building a relationship with the skill sets you hire, now and in the future.
There are 3 different types of retargeting. Site, Email and Creative. All of them involve placing a cookie on the computer of the visitor and delivering an ad to them on other websites.
Site Retargeting:
The process of retargeting is straight-forward. When a visitor comes to your career site, a cookie is placed on their computer recording the type of position they searched on your site. When the visitor leaves your site and travels to other online sites of interest to them, they will be recognized as someone who has visited your site previously, and will immediately have your ad delivered to them. Very simple and enormously impactful.
Email Retargeting:
Though not a retargeting function itself, email is included because it is such a natural feeder for Site Retargeting. When an email is opened and the link clicked on, the retargeting cookie is set. The candidate remains anonymous through this process – no ones right to privacy is violated. You are then able to retarget advertisements to this individual. (Imagine sending an email to a prospective Pharmacist, they click on your link to your Pharmacy Careers microsite but don’t apply. You can still market your Pharmacy opportunities to this individual as they visit other web sites and redirect them back to your Pharmacy microsite or application page. Your banner ad is fully customized for this specific career opportunity so the message is 100% relevant.)
Creative Retargeting:
Creative retargeting works the same way, but the candidate is identified when they visit a site you currently advertise on. So, if you advertise on petroleum engineer.com or nurse.com – when a visitor comes to that site and your ad is served onto their screen, the ad places the cookie on their computer. As a result, your ad works to identify them as someone you want to retarget. When they leave the industry or trade publication site and go to CNN – Bob is identified and your ad is served to him on CNN. Because he sees an ad related to his industry – on a site that isn’t – your ad stands out. When your message piques his interest, he clicks on it and is directed wherever you want – maybe back to your site.
What makes retargeting successful is the results it generates. When comparing click through rates of online campaigns where retargeting was used it increased the ‘lift’ by anywhere from 17-60%. (Campaigns in this study included recruitment campaigns for companies in the Retail Services, Financial Services, Automotive and Packaged Goods industries.)
Retargeting is critical to your marketing efforts for one primary reason – a candidate who has expressed their interest in you by visiting your web site is more qualified than one who did not visit your web site. Retargeting allows you to focus your ad dollars on these “pre-qualified”, or “filtered” candidates which will improve your ability to attract the talent you want. Keeping your communication highly relevant by serving ads based on the specific jobs the candidate has reviewed keeps the candidate interested well into the process of sorting resumes and setting up next steps. Your acquisition cost is lowered by targeting only people who have visited your site – 100% target reach.
When your message is served to visitors on lifestyle and information sites chosen by them, your employment brand is associated with their interests and develops a lifestyle affiliation.
Once they leave your site, they are no longer thinking of you – but retargeting allows you to remain top of mind as they move around the net through out the day.
The ad campaigns deployed through retargeting should include the messages you want a prospect to think about your company – things like testimonials from other employees, awards you may have won that puts you in the forefront of your industry, or news and information that establishes you as an employer of choice.
Interested in learning more? Alstin will be hosting a webinar in mid-November on retargeting. Click here jhitchens@Alstin.com if you’d like to receive more information or are interested in registering for our webinar. The date and time will be announced shortly.
- Jennifer Hitchens, Director of Interactive Services
Why Your Boss Should Tweet
in the news...
Now available: LinkedIN & Twitter integration allows you to:
- Display Twitter on your LinkedIn profile
- Share Twitter messages with your LinkedIn contacts or groups
- Share LinkedIn jobs, news, and more on Twitter
You can opt to display your Twitter account on your profile and share all or some of your tweets on your LinkedIn profile (just set up the account and use #in within your tweets).
Weddles – New Resource – Use the Best Keywords to Find the Best Talent - How can you tell search engines and computers what kind of candidate you're looking for? Use Finding Needles in a Haystack. Just released by WEDDLE's, this 3-volume set is the first comprehensive listing of keywords for successfully searching resume databases online and off. You can select individual volumes or get the entire set.
Excerpts from CareerXRoads’ Gerry Crispin November update on Social Media:
“We did a quick, less formal survey of large, highly-competitive firms (5000 or more employees) in the last two weeks and were not surprised to see a huge response and interest in the results.”
- 44% of current respondents do NOT have any policy governing Social Media usage
- 58.5% of those with policies first wrote or revised them in the last 6 months
- Policies were most likely written by Legal (35%), violations handled by HR (43.9%) or legal (39.4%), audits are mostly performed by Legal (41.9%); employees are informed about SM by Communications (39.7) rather than HR (8.1%).
- Less than half the firms surveyed (47.8%) have even attempted to put together Corporate, multi- discipline task forces to oversee Social Media policies but even those who have them aren't sure who is leading
- 6% have developed a "Community Manager" role to engage the firm in developing a deeper business understanding for how SM could contribute
- In the end we'll work it out. As SM is shown to contribute to business solutions, and we are sure it will, the defensiveness will tail off and the challenges around who is its champion will suddenly be resolved.
