Best Practices: Recruiting with Cost-per-Click Campaigns on Facebook is Cheaper than on Google
Search Engine Marketing (SEM) has been a long standing strategy in recruitment. Today, “jobs” keywords are some of the most popular and competitively bid upon terms on Google and other search engines. Corporations large and small participate in this game of one-upsmanship to try to land the coveted best spot on Google’s search results page…the top slot.
It makes sense that this is a popular option. Anyone can play. All you need is a credit card and an e-mail address. What recruiters haven’t yet understood is that job seekers are not only looking for jobs on Google. Also, job seekers on Google are almost exclusively active job seekers. It’s very difficult to reach the reclusive passive job seeker with Google search.
There are other cost-per-click options for recruitment. Indeed and SimplyHired give advertisers an option to sponsor their jobs on the site (preferential search treatment) or to buy keywords. But these options are still expensive and still miss the passive job seekers.
Let’s talk about expense. The beauty (for Google) of the Google model is that it is a purely market driven process. You get what you pay for. If you want to advertise to pharmacists, you can. It will cost you an average of $1.89 per click. Google tells you that you can expect about 56 clicks per day at that bid. Using a little math, this tells me that there are approximately 4308 daily searches on Google for the keywords “pharmacist jobs.” The more searches/clicks for this keyword on Google, the more inventory. Simple supply vs. demand will tell you that the more inventory of searches/clicks, the cheaper these clicks will be. But the bid rates are still so expensive. Why does it cost $1.89 per click for pharmacists?
Today, there is another option for recruiters…Facebook ads. If you just read that last sentence followed by a guffaw, I ask you keep reading to see why Facebook ads are a great alternative to Google ads. Did you know that for the past month or so Facebook has been the most visited site in the U.S.? That means even more people visit Facebook on a daily basis than visit Google. Facebook also gets more pageviews. This means more ad inventory.
Also, Facebook ads let recruiters get their message in front of both active and passive job seekers. How is that? Facebook ads are delivered to pages based on the “interests” of the user logged-in. Users don’t have to go and actively search for jobs on Facebook. Based on the user’s profile information, Facebook has a pretty good idea of what kind of job you might be interested in. My profile says that I work in government sales (in my day job). So I very often see ads for federal sales conferences or veteran’s employment resources.
Another great thing going for Facebook ads is the inventory itself. On Google, recruiters have maybe a week’s worth of time to get their message in front of job seekers looking for their kind of career. To take it one step further, once the message is delivered to relevant job seekers, the seeker has to see the sponsored link and be motivated to click it. This is not the case with Facebook ads. Let’s go back to our pharmacist example. Google gets 4308 daily pharmacist jobs searches.
Facebook doesn’t really get pharmacist job searches, but there are 37,520 people who list that they are pharmacists on Facebook (in the U.S., who are 18 years old and older and have a college degree). Recruiters can use this base of existing pharmacists who daily use Facebook as a lifestyle and communications tool to target ads to them. These pharmacists may be actively looking for a new career path, but most likely they will be the passive job seeker. And what about cost? To serve ads to this group will cost recruiters an average of $0.63 per click. If we extrapolate these numbers we get a lot of ads served for a very low cost. Let’s say that each of these pharmacists visits Facebook every day. Each day they have 10 page views. If you can serve an ad every 10 page views to this group for a month, you would get some 1.1 million impressions to qualified pharmacists over a 30 day span. If these ads have an average click through rate, you will end up spending about $775 on this campaign and north of 1100 clicks. This same campaign on Google would cost you $3,175.20 and yield 1680 clicks. You get almost the same number of clicks for 1/5 the price.
If you take it a little further, you see that Facebook ads are not only more cost effective, they are more highly targeted too. On Google I can say I want to serve ads to folks looking for pharmacist jobs. I did this search and was served ads (that I didn’t click on) and I am completely unqualified to ever be a pharmacist. On Facebook, everyone who sees my pharmacist job ads will be qualified. How do I know that’s true? Users typically don’t lie on Facebook about profession etc. If I state on my profile that I am a pharmacist, my wife will call me out on it in about 5 minutes.
To sum up, here is a very short list of a handful of professions and the cost disparity between Google and Facebook advertising. Based on this very incomplete list, you be the judge at which tools is better. The next time you go to a search engine to bid on some recruitment keywords, keep this chart in mind.
Keyword Google bid range (per click) Facebook bid range (per click)
Nurse jobs $2.05 – $2.82 $0.60 – $0.71
Sales jobs $1.99 – $2.72 $0.57 – $0.68
Customer Services Jobs $1.44 – $1.87 $0.56 – $0.67
IT networking jobs $1.87 – $2.81 $0.63 – $0.73
CPA jobs $2.30 – $3.44 $0.50 – $0.69
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