What Do Pay Per Click Job Postings Really Cost?
I'm a big fan of performance-based recruitment advertising, which essentially means that the advertiser only pays for ads which deliver the results promised by the publisher. For pay per click job posting campaigns, that generally means you pay the publisher each time someone sees your ad on the publisher's site and clicks on the ad to go to your site. For pay per lead job posting campaigns, that generally means you pay the publisher each time someone sees your ad on the publisher's site, clicks on the ad to go to your site, and then registers at your site. Employers buying advertising on a pay per lead basis will often refer to these campaigns as pay per resume or pay per applicant because they are paying for job seekers to submit their resumes or otherwise register at the employer's web site.
But what do these campaigns really cost? For those who have never purchased advertising on a pay per click or pay per lead basis, the jargon and math can be a little daunting. First, let's look at a pay per click campaign. If you pay Google, Yahoo, or a job board like CollegeRecruiter.com $0.50 per click (the amounts vary considerably depending on the publisher and your target audience) then for each click you pay $0.50. Easy enough, right? Not so fast. What employers really care about is their cost per hire. In other words, what is their total cost to hire one person?
Let's use numbers gathered by CareerXroads from large employers to help guide us. They reported that the average employer saw about 68,000 visitors reached their staffing pages, about 18,000 of the visitors completed an application for a specific job, about 6,000 of the completed applications were qualified applicants for the jobs they applied for, about 2,000 of the 6,000 became finalists, and the 2,000 finalists turned into 500 hires. So for every hire, the employers had four finalists, 12 qualified applications, 36 applications, and 136 visitors.
If the employers paid $0.50 per click for each of these visitors, the cost of one hire would be 136 visitors times $0.50 per click, which is $68. Not bad. Another way of buying performance-based advertising is on a per lead basis. Lead-based campaigns also vary widely in pricing depending on the publisher and the target market but let's use the standard $5 per lead that we charge. If the same employers had run a pay per lead instead of pay per click campaign, they would have paid $5 per lead times the 36 applications they received, which works out to a cost of $180. That's a little less than three times the cost of a pay per click campaign so on the surface pay per click is a better deal but remember that the numbers vary considerably depending on the publisher and the needs of the advertiser.
Remember when I wrote that I'm a big believer in pay for performance? This is why. The risk of the ad not performing well is all on the publisher. If we don't deliver the candidates that we should, we don't get paid. But if we do deliver, we are paid and should be paid more because we shouldered the risk of non-performance. If you ran an ordinary job posting ad for 60 days then we'd charge $175. You'd probably hire someone but maybe not. Either way, you're paying $175. If you shift some of the risk to us and run it instead as a pay per click campaign then using the numbers above we'd make $68. If you shift all of the risk to us then we'd make $180 using the numbers above.
Pay for performance isn't about saving money for the advertiser or making more money for the publisher. It is about better aligning their short- and long-term interests. Both sides have a powerful financial incentive to do everything they can to make the ad work. The advertiser wants to hire someone and the publisher wants to generate the right candidate flow so they make money from the advertising. And wouldn't it be great if all of your vendors had their interests fully aligned with theirs?
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There is a new option to adsense, we pay 75% of earnings for publishers and advertisers to minimum of $ 5.00 to advertise on the network, the entire transaction is by paypal.
We need new partners who want to make money with this new option to pay per click.