We wanted to make a tighter connection between jobseekers and Totaljobs.com through search, which resulted in a forensic analysis of their business. In doing so, we identified two broad areas to examine in detail, specifically: exogenous factors (seasonality, influx of jobseekers in January, the downturn during school summer holidays etc) and endogenous factors (the website inventory [job types and volumes] and other marketing activity).

In partnership with the Totaljobs.com search team, we restructured the search account as follows:

1. Dynamically reduced or increased spend throughout the year, according to a carefully modelled set of contributing factors.
2. Matched search terms more specifically to Totaljobs.com’s inventory, so that jobseekers were able to both find the right jobs and access them more quickly, which required us to develop a completely bespoke piece of technology to take live feeds from the client database.
3. Automated the bid process where possible, but left sufficient flexibility in the structure to benefit from “human” contextual insights (the client’s superior online recruitment sector knowledge) to deliver further performance gains beyond the algorithm.
4. Validated Totaljob.com’s search objectives against our in-depth search channel knowledge, whilst also leveraging our strong media owner relationships and their knowledge of the broader category and market overall.

From a market leader position, and together in partnership, we increased response rates by 27% (versus the Google benchmark average for recruitment advertisers), the click to application conversion rate increased by 4.5% and click to unique application conversion rate increased by 1.5%. This campaign also won the 2009 New Media Age Best Use of Search award.