I just launched a site on behalf of a client that’s intended to collect resumes for addition to a database.
The client is a research specialist in the Recruitment Industry with 12 years of experience and an internal database of over 150,000 Canadian company locations, including ones that are hard to find like distribution centers and internal departments that aren’t usually listed elsewhere.
What we’re doing with the resumes is matching them up with locations so we can use the database to search not only for Companies, but also for Candidates for positions. There are already over 1 million Candidates in our database, but the linkage between Candidates and Locations is spotty, so we’re developing a methodology to improve the correlations.
The tool already allows the Recruiter to develop target lists of Candidates or Locations to call in a fraction of the time it might normally take. Recruiters can easily burn a week looking for information that we can get in a few mouse clicks. Useful stuff!
Anyhow, we recently talked to some potential investors who wanted hard numbers that we don’t yet have, and which would be difficult to extract using our current model. So what I’ve done is create a sub-site using WordPress MU that has a bit of marketing information and requests resumes using a simple form. The form sends the user to a page advertising www.trainingcenter.com, which offers Online Training in a variety of career-related functions, as well as Industry Certification test preparation and other online computer training courses.
With the addition of a Google AdWords Campaign targeting job and career related keywords, I’m able to drive traffic to the sub-site and use Google Analytics to track Conversion Rates when anybody clicks on the ads. I think the Recruiting firm’s pitch is actually an easy sell, and so far the AdWords are getting a 20% Conversion Rate.
For the purposes of this test Conversion equals filling out the form giving us contact information and/or a resume. I started with a $200 budget, with a maximum bid of $2 on 71 low competition keywords, and set the maximum daily budget to $50. Even low competition keywords are fairly competitive on Google, so the ads have a fairly low profile and are not likely to even approach a $50 daily cost. The average cost per click so far is around $0.63.
Once the AdWords Campaign has run its course, I’ll not only be able to extract the data and answer investor’s questions about how we’re going to be able to entice people to add themselves to our database, how many new additions we can expect etc., but we’ll also have a lot of new data. Win-win, as they say – especially since so far the Conversion Rate is about 20%. If we extrapolate those numbers, we’re looking at a LOT of new data when we ramp up the advertising.
I’m also using www.trainingcenter.com as a Conversion test. If people click on the link and buy training, it’ll give me a sense of the potential of Affiliate Marketing as a secondary revenue stream for the site. Candidate information is the bread and butter product for a Recruiting firm, but if the website itself can generate revenue, we’re golden.
If you’d like to be able to do this yourself, just go to adwords.google.com to create your AdWords account and get started, or click the links at the bottom of this article.
All hail The Mighty Goog!
Now I’ve just got to re-vamp the look of the rest of the site so it matches the look of the promotional sub-site. Then back to work on the business plan. In a couple of weeks I’ll be helping present it to investors again. Joy.
If you want to go to Google’s useful (and free) help areas, click one of these links:
Google AdWords Online Classroom
Google AdWords Small Business Center
