RCEuro Member Blogs

Aggregation and Data Driven Marketing

Simon Appleton

They founded Planet Recruit and sold it to Hot Group in 2003. Set up Workcircle initially as an IT job board.  Changed to Vertical Search Engine (Aggregator).

What does the aggregator really do?
For Candidate: can search across multiple platforms on one site.
Traffic source/driver for job advertisers – job boards, employers, agencies

What is Data Driven Marketing?
Attract  the right candidates in high volume, and then direct them to the right destination site.

Tony Jewell

How have the new revenue generating and traffic generating models evolved?

Nice stuff on ‘cost per action’ if you run a web business
Evolution of their thinking on most cost effective way of gathering jobs and then reaching the candidates.

What they call: Workcircle 2.0
Evolved to the jobs aggregation model (like Indeed.com  from the US)
Can help the smaller niche job boards get ‘cheap’ traffic
Challenge was how much traffic could the cost effectively buy.

Long tail thinking entered into the evolution of Workcircle
Sponsor all combinations of a job title (wrote a tool to generate the long tail list  - over 1 million keywords)
Used the Google API (application programming interface) to create the giant Google Adword campaigns
Resulted in Massive Traffic Driving
Lots of great stats and ROI data for them (80% ROI for money spent on Google).

Lessons learned
Using both SEM (for paid for listings)  and SEO (for organic listings)  to ensure overall listing and traffic works at optimum for traffic driving

Long Tail generates overall cost is optimised

Ensure that paid for listings have the deep link directly to the job, not the job site

Ensure that you actually have job inventory to match the keywords you are actually advertising

Click through rate is not the best measure of ad success