Display ads have been having a hard time lately. It just doesn’t seem as sexy or effective when compared to the promise of search advertising, social networking, web 2.0 strategies and mobile applications. And if all the recent talk about emerging message environments and technologies wasn’t enough, like the hapless 90 lb weakling in a Charles Atlas ad, along comes a report from comScore to kick sand in the display ads’ face. How much sand? Try new statistics that reveal only 16% of internet users click on display ads in a month. This is a 50% drop from the last time comScore reported on the same behavior in July 07 when 32% of internet users would engage in a click behavior on an online display ad. comScore’s research goes further to indicate that a core 8% of the internet population produces 85% of all display ad clicks in a given month.

 So what does this mean? Is it time for display ad campaigns to throw in the towel and make the internet a banner-free wonderland? Not at all. Instead, this is an opportunity to rethink where display ads fit into your overall strategy. So less people click on display ads than have in the past – this shows that the internet and user behaviors on the internet are changing over time. That makes sense, the display ad was the first form of internet advertising available and as advertising formats and options have emerged it would be silly to think that the one-time, standalone online ad wouldn’t see its’ place in the online advertising world shift. These numbers don’t mean that display ads are only good for engaging 16% of the online population – instead they raise two questions: 1)Is the click the right measurement for display ads?, and 2) how do you speak the remaining 84% who seemingly ignore display ads?

 The tendency to measure display ads by click is, I believe, a well intentioned mistake and leftover from early banner advertising. Let’s put this in perspective. Until online advertising came along there was no reliable, detailed way to measure the impact of an ad campaign in print, TV, billboard, radio, etc. The internet changed all that. Suddenly we have the ability to measure the performance of an ad campaign by so many different metrics and dimensions that it’s often a challenge to sort out, identify and track the truly meaningful information. After the impression, the click was the first metric that was easy to identify and track as an actual engagement measure, and lately even the click has given way to a desire to track conversion (i.e.: sale, lead gen, etc.) as the primary metric of value. In short we have seen a tendency in metric reporting to ‘race for the bottom’ of the engagement funnel.

 Funnels aren’t just for frat parties

 Let’s look at the typical user engagement funnel: Attention – Interest – Desire – Action. These are the core stages of engaging a person with your message and getting them to take the action you want whether it’s buying a time-share,  a toaster or having them complete a job application online. As we race for the bottom of engagement tracking, all the focus is on stage four – having the audience take an action. But this action doesn’t happen in a vacuum, there are three crucial stages a person must go through on their way to being ready to take an action.

 New research is indicating that display ad performance measurement and value is closer to the top of the engagement funnel instead of the bottom. According to comScore, display ads should be evaluated by their view-through impact. Additional research has shown that display advertising creates a noticeable long-term lift in areas like trademark search, sales (both online and offline) and brand site visitation by internet users who were exposed to online ad campaigns. This is whether they clicked on the original display ad or not. These results, which were tracked across seven distinct verticals, show an average 46% lift in site reach from 1-4 weeks after a user was first exposed to the display ad creative.

 The take-away: brand matters, message matters, impressions matter. Impressions and visibility make, well, an impression. Are clicks important? Absolutely — and so are conversions. But before people will take one of these deeper engagement actions you have to build awareness. This is why it’s crucial to build employer brand identity with your audience. So display ads have poor click through rates… that’s fine. Stop measuring them by the wrong metric. What’s important is to have a strategy that properly engages 84% of the display ad audience: the people who don’t click.

 Next week: Part II – How to prime the top of the funnel to build a traffic stream.

My reply:

Imagine this: you are Pavlov’s Poodle and your Twitter Alert, TXT message notification, incoming wall post notice (along with other social media ‘incoming content’ cues) are all bells triggering a behavioral response. Triggering, in fact, your brain’s pleasure centers and creating a loops which virtually assures continued engagement. In “Seeking. How the brain hard-wires us to love Google, Twitter, and texting. And why that’s dangerous.” Emily Yoffe reveals some amazing research shedding light on how the acts of searching and finding trigger pleasure centers in the brain. Remember those studies with lab rats who would ignore food as long as they could press a button to stimulate their brain’s pleasure centers? Well — essentially we’re the rats and Google is the button. One of many such ‘buttons’ like mobile phone TXTs, Tweets, emails, etc.

According to the results from some researchers, it isn’t even the act of getting a reward which is the most powerful element in this phenomena. The acts of wanting and seeking or EXPECTING new information can become more addictive and pleasurable than actually getting the information in question. So you sit down to search for one item of information and find yourself still online an hour later performing search-after-search, caught in a loop where the act of seeking is just as important and fulfilling as actually finding what you are looking for. This is called a seeking/wanting system and if you’ve ever felt a shiver of excitement or anticipation at the incoming tone for a TXT message, tweet or email you have experienced the phenomena first-handed.

So let’s go back to our would-be candidate, the job seeker who has requested to be notified whenever a position fitting their criteria has been posted or when an article specific to their interests is available. You’re already providing them convenience — providing information to them in the media and format they have requested through the device of their choice. All great reasons to take advantage of this technology. But if researchers are correct in their findings, you are also ‘priming’ your job seeker: getting them excited, triggering anticipation pleasure in expectation of a ‘reward’ as you ring the bell. Would these be worthwhile emotions to tap into and engage right before they read about an job opening specifically related to their career goals? That would be pretty powerful stuff, and is very likely exactly what is happening every time someone gets a mobile (or other social media or email) career-related message.

You see, for months I’ve been having the same ad inflicted upon me. If you fly frequently and have flipped through any of these airline magazines I am sure you will be familiar with it. The company (Cenegenics) claims to be able to reverse “the signs and symptoms of aging.” As Paul Newman says in The Hudsucker Proxy ‘Yeah, yeah. Sure, sure.” Maybe it’s true but their ads just creep me out.

First there were a few variations on the ad below:

Look, I hope all the claims about this wonder-whatever are true. And maybe this guy is cut from the same cloth as Jack Lalanne, fully ready to kick sand in my face and twist my head off as easily as a bottle cap. I mean, look at that muscle tone! Look at that definition! Look at that cut-and-pasted on head! oh, wait, um….yea. Really?!?

OK, so maybe my reaction is a little knee-jerk skeptical. Maybe I’m just assuming the worst. So for months I let it slide until I saw the follow up ad below featuring another happy (what a coincidence!) physician. BTW…I have to wonder if a little research would show that these examples of Cenegenic’s amazing results are also tied to the company in any business sense. OK…so here’s the next ad:

OK, so at least in the first ad, IF they altered it, they did an OK cut and paste job. I don’t know quite WHAT I’m supposed to think of Dr. Jacob’s ‘After Cenegenics’ image. I mean…is it even real? Maybe something gets lost in bringing this picture off the page and onto the web, but the after image looks like it’s totally CGI…something made in Poser or some other 3-D modelling tool to create Dr. “Pump You Up” And is he really a doctor? He looks like he should be moonlighting as a South Beach gigolo in some bizarre ‘C movie’ by Dreamworks for the Lifetime Channel feature film.

What do you think? Am I too jaded and cynical or does this look like good visual proof that Cenegenics has the uber-cure for aging in their hands?

The other day I received a call from an associate engaged in recruitment video marketing. He had just read my recent post “Do You Have The Best Job In The World?” and we got to talking about the power of video to reveal culture, work experience, and how it can help job seekers self select whether they are appropriate for employment in an organization or a particular career. Our discussion reminded me of a video I stumbled across some time ago which I’d like to share with you. You may have seen it before (it’s about two years old), but it’s certainly worth another view.

If I’ve said it once I’ve said it a hundred times. IMHO our aim should be to make people salivate with desire to work someplace. Create desire…point at opportunity. Make your pipeline a throng of people wanting behind the red velvet rope. Now I’ve said it one hundred and one times.

Of course if you can make your message social media friendly and viral too…well, all the better.

If you’re bored of recruitment videos that remind you of a PSA spot on ‘local cable,’ or something out of a show on The Learning Channel or Discovery, I have an example of the recruitment video cure. Let’s make something clear: the difference between what this video HAS and DOES NOT HAVE is not an issue of who wrote and produced the video; rather, it’s a result of what the company was willing to reveal about itself. The company had to “get out of its own way” and allow a shift in communication from corporate mission to authentic revelation. The two are not mutually exclusive. One is just less formal than the other.

This video has no:

1) Talking Heads
2) Description of Work
3) Voice Overs
4) Company Stats

In other words, none of the ubiquitous hallmarks that make you feel like you are being sold or lectured to.

Check it out now: http://ow.ly/i1Yy

What it does have:

1) A great soundtrack
2) Work Environment – and a fun one at that, complete with a ping-pong table – you get to travel the office through the song
3) Co-workers who aren’t afraid to be silly or have fun
4) Good production value…no shaky camera or bad lighting
5) Sly pop-culture (like the SILF t-shirt)
6) FUN
7) Just when you feel like you’re watching a music video, the sound shuts off and you get the employees singing and the aftermath of the shoot. They are real and you get to see them that way
8) A link to an annotated Flikr photo of the people in the video, with each person identified

The company is Connected Ventures. They run Busted Tees and College Humor (hence the very Gen Y staff). The video was shot in one take. ONE. The first take, even.

The bad thing…their careers page is ONE PAGE linked to brief, underdeveloped job descriptions. Also, there is no sign of this video…or testimonials…or photos (through Flikr which would be awesome with this audience)…or example projects…etc. Oh and the link on their video goes to a 404 File Not Found message — the result of an orphaned social media campaign. This is something for us to keep in mind for any social media/bookmarking campaign. Just because an initiative is over doesn’t mean links (or potential link juice) go away. A branded 404 “Page Not Found” would be useful here to say the least, even if it isn’t specifically recruitment focused.

Why does this video work? I’ll steal a line from Jeffrey Gitomer: People hate to be sold to but they love to buy. And this video gives the passive (and active) candidate something to BUY. They can buy the workplace (some wide-open, sunlit places complete with a ping pong table), they can buy the casual (t-shirt friendly) dress code, the can buy an employer who is willing to have fun on video and and employees who aren’t afraid to get on camera and act silly. Without telling you anything specifically, the video tells you a lot about Connected Ventures.

Not every place is a Connected Ventures…many are the exact opposite. But if you can open up to DISCOVER and REVEAL even just ONE powerful Employment Value Proposition which is vibrant, realistic and RESONATES with your ideal candidate, you can use it, share it and benefit from it.

There is a lot of talk about corporate transparency and corporate ethics and responsibility. Transparency can also be used to attract and communicate, but you might have to loosen your tie a little bit and let your workforce, your environment, your inner voice speak up and say the things that can not be expressed in a brochure and corporate mission statement. Give that a try and you might be amazed at how job seekers (both active and passive alike) respond, they might even say:

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It’s likely that you have already heard about the ingenious ‘Win the Best Job in the World’ campaign created by Tourism Queensland to help promote travel and, well, tourism to Queensland and Australia. In case you haven’t heard about the campaign, it began in 2008 and offered the following glamorous job: feeding fish, cleaning the pool and posting weekly blogs about the experience. 34,000 people applied for the job. Did I mention that the job pays around $150,000 and provides housing in a $5m villa on Hamilton Island in the Great Barrier Reef? Did I mention the daily oppportunities for snorkeling, sailing and island-hopping? Yes, it seems likely that the position of ‘Island Caretaker’ could indeed be ‘The Best Job in the World.’

So how do you attract 34,000 job applicants? First of all, aside from the attractive compensation and housing, Tourism Queensland provided their target audience a clear idea of the traits they were looking for and the skills needed for success. According to the organization, in addition to feeding the fish and other such chores, “The successful applicant will be required to report back on their adventures to Tourism Queensland headquarters in Brisbane (and the rest of the world) via weekly blogs, photo diary, video updates and ongoing media interviews.” They were looking for someone adventurous, passionate about the outdoors, willing to try new things, have strong communication skills in English (both as a speaker and in writing) and, of course, the ideal applicant would be a good swimmer who enjoys snorkeling/diving.

So, what about you? Do you have the best job in the world at your organization? Are you hiring for the best job in the world? Wouldn’t it be great if you could reach out to job seekers and say: “Here’s a job you’re going to love. Let me tell you why.” I can already hear you saying “Are you kidding? We don’t have an exotic locale, our job description doesn’t include snorkeling in crystal clear water. Real jobs are not like that.” I disagree. Let’s set our sights just a little lower than the lofty goal of ‘Best Job in the World’, lets focus on matching job seekers with the Best Job Ever…for them. You can find the tell-tale signs of people who have the Best Job Ever (BJE) by asking three simple questions of your organization’s employees: 1) Why did you take this position?, 2) Why do you stay with this organization? and 3) What do you enjoy most about your work experience? Sure you could ask more, but at this point you don’t need a full-fledged survey to track down BJEs — you need to find signs of engagement, passion and fulfillment among your employees. You need to find the stories that highlight what makes you unique.

My job is the Best Job Ever because it allows me to: 1) work with topics which fascinate me, 2) continually challenge myself, acquire new skills and develop those I already have , 3) travel and meet new people, 4) provide comprehensive solutions to specific problems and 5) work with a close-knit team of professionals i respect.

There are BJEs in every organization, what makes your job a BJE or what BJE opportunities exist in your company?

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The more specific your terms the more capable we are of determining the job seeker’s intent. Matching the searcher’s intent is what allows you to successfully engage with the search engine job seeker. The job seeker looking for ‘nursing jobs’ has a less specific intent than the searcher looking for ‘nursing jobs salary’ and their informational goals could be quite different. The ‘nursing jobs’ job seeker could be interested in locating sites where they can find job opportunities, maybe a job board or an aggregation site where they can perform a search. They could just as easily be researching how many different types of nursing jobs exist for a school paper. Typically speaking, the fewer the terms a person searches with, the more vague their search intent — and the more competition there is to gain a first page listing on a search engine for these high traffic terms.

We can place the keywords an active job seeker uses into four different categories, each with distinct traffic volumes and specificity of intent:

• Core Search Terms
• Position/Job Title Terms
• Location Terms
• Hybrid long-tail phrases

Core Search terms can also be considered job browsing terms — they are the highest level, least specific job search related terms for a particular area of work such as nursing jobs or nursing careers. These are search phrases which see very high volumes of activity but there is a distinct order of job seeker preference which echoes across different groups of job seekers. In fact, according to Google’s search volume reports, just adding one simple letter to one word can increase the search activity on a core search term phrase by over 100,000 searches per month or more. What letter could wield such power? The letter ‘s’. Job seekers typically seem to favor the plural form of the words job and career. The terms jobs and careers consistently generate more searches than their singular forms: job and career. In some cases these increases can be as high as 1258% to 2400%.

Typical core search terms include the following (the term ‘nursing’ is used as a job field indicator for example purposes): nursing jobs, nursing careers, nursing employment, nursing job and nursing career. The search volumes for these phrases is typically quite high, especially for phrases containing ‘jobs’ or ‘careers’ and typically the organic, non-paid, search results for these terms are dominated by job boards. Arguably, at this phase of the job search experience the active job seeker using these search phrases is looking for job search resources although if the right job opportunity or company were to appear in these listings, it would definitely receive traffic.

Position/Job Title Terms could be considered ‘strong active’ job seeker searches. These are searches specific to a particular position or job skill. For the core search term ‘nursing jobs’ a related position search phrase would be ‘registered nurse jobs’ or ‘nursing assistant jobs’. From a search volume perspective, it is not uncommon for more than half of the top 20 search related terms about a particular field to consist of these position specific terms. Again, depending on the job family niche these volumes can be quite high (i.e.: sales manager jobs with ~74K average searches per month) or noticeably lower (i.e.: accounting sales jobs with ~210 average searches per month). However, like the core search terms mentioned above, these search results pages are often dominated by both the general audience and niche audience job boards. Again, the seeker looking in this area is probably looking for job search resources but would welcome the appearance of a familiar company name in their area.

Location terms are even more specific variations of the previous search phrases. Why look for nursing jobs everywhere when you know you really want a nursing job in the greater Boston area? Depending on the job field these monthly job search volumes tend to be in the thousands for state-related searches, in the hundreds for city-related searches, and for some locations the search volume is so low that Google will simply report ‘not enough data’. Who is your competition here? It’s not your candidate-space competitor across town who’s looking for the same talent you are. Yet again these search results tend to be dominated by general and niche job boards. However, depending on the job niche and the city, it is not uncommon to see the occasional business show up in this type of search result.

There are syntactical variations to all of the above searches: people looking for ‘jobs in sales’, ‘nursing job finder’, ‘engineering vacancies’, ‘nurse job opening’ and the like. Some of these can even generate a fair amount of traffic but typically, as seen with the rest of the types of searches performed, the search listing competition is dominated by job board sites.

Finally, there are long-tail search phrases. Long tail phrases are typically very specific job search related phrases like ‘sales jobs in fort lauderdale fl’ or ‘nursing jobs boston area.’ These search phrases typically see much less traffic than the more general search phrases mentioned above. And, although the competition for these phrases can be much less fierce than that seen for the other types of job seekers searches, it is still no cake-walk to get a first page listing for these phrases. The strength of the job boards in the other search areas still lends to them appearing in search results for these phrases. The key question that long-tail job search raises is: how much is a search phrase which may only bring in one click a month really worth? On it’s own, not much. This is why typical job search SEO long-tail strategies focus on hundreds, if not thousands of long-tail search terms. Variation after variation of ‘job name city’, ‘job name city state’, etc.

The goal of long-tail search phrases is to attract visitors who have signaled very specific intent through phrases which get typically get very low volumes of search on a monthly or quarterly basis. The intent of these long-tail visitors is typically more ‘serious’ than your ‘browsing’ job seeker using a search engine. These are visitors whose intent, when matched with the appropriate information on your ‘landing page’ (the page they arrive at after clicking your link) are more likely to convert…either as an applicant or by joining a talent network, subscribing to an RSS feed, etc. The value of the actual volume and leads generated through these long-tail methods in search engines (not job search aggregation sites) needs to be carefully balanced against the cost of implementation and how the execution fits into your entire online recruitment strategy.

Why job boards are your search engine competitors.

When it comes to search listings, the search engines look to two primary items to determine if a page should be listed high in search results: content and confirmation. Yes, Google’s ranking algorithm is complex and yes there is more to it than JUST these two items, but these two represent the heart and soul of search. Google and the other search engines want to know what the page is about and the more closely the page’s content relates to the specific search term being used by someone, the more likely that page is to be listed. However it isn’t enough for your page to contain content about a subject or to be ‘optimized’ for a specific search phrase. The search engines want confirmation that your page REALLY IS about that topic, and even more importantly that it contains worthwhile content about the subject. To get that confirmation they look for links, links inside your site that point to that page and links from other sites that point to your page. The more links you have from credible online sources, the more certain the search engines are that your page is related to the search phrase. Optimizing for the exact search phrase is crucial, and subtle: under-represent the phrase in your strategy and you will get ignored, use it too aggressively and you risk being penalized for ‘over optimization.’

The job boards have plenty of what Google loves: Content and Confirmation. This translates into millions of page of content capable of linking to each other with keywords specifically created to align with the four job search patterns: core, position/job title, location and long-tail hybrid search phrases. They have strong networks of links pointing to them, reaffirming that the content of their pages is topical and relevant. Oftentimes, they are your search engine competition, not the company who is out recruiting the same talent as you.

So how do you get your career messaging and opportunities seen by search engine job seekers? How do you compete with the job board juggernauts? In part 2 of this post we will look at some solutions to this dilemma and your secret weapon for candidate engagement. In the meantime, please share your search engine optimization experiences.

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Step 1: ReTweet this EXACT message on Twitter. Simply copy and paste the text below and post it to your Twitter account. If you don’t have a Twitter account, you’ll need to get one here for free: http://www.twitter.com

RT @kevinbhawkins Discover how Web 2.0 can help a recruitment and branding strategy soar. Get your Free report. http://tinyurl.com/camr3f

Step 2: Follow me on Twitter. You can follow me by visiting the link below and clicking on the ‘follow’ button below my picture: http://twitter.com/kevinbhawkins

That’s it! As soon as you complete both these steps, I will automatically send you your free Web 2.0 Recruiting report via a Twitter Direct Message, so please check your ‘Direct Messages’ inbox on Twitter for the download link after you have followed the 2 easy steps above. (It might take a minute for the Direct Message to arrive, but once you follow the steps above it will be automatically sent to you.)

Enjoy!

Name? “Widgets, Inc. We’ve been making quality widgets since 1962.”

Rank? “We have 4 Account Manager Level III positions available.”

Serial Number? “We offer an exciting, challenging environment for self-motivated achievers. Excellent benefits. Click here to apply!”

To engage candidates properly on your career site, to stand out, think of each candidate as a customer and your company as the product. The better your product is presented, the more motivated your customer. Let’s look at an example from the consumer landscape: In 2003, J.D. Power placed the Land Rover near the bottom of their customer service index ranking. That didn’t adversely affect their sales though. Buyers wanted something more than just a reliable truck; they wanted the feeling they had when they drove a Land Rover. They wanted to drive off-road in exotic locales and experience the sense of adventure and freedom in Land Rover’s ads. The average Land Rover owner may never use it for more than driving to work, shopping and errands – but they bought it for the feeling of excitement.

“Recruiting is marketing” may sound simple, even trite, but very few put this in action on their Web sites. Career sites do not speak to job seekers to fire their imagination and desire. Most are bland Frankenstein monsters created from the pieces and parts of various company brochures stitched together with “Help Wanted” classifieds. That’s not a career site – it’s a corporate promo piece with job listings attached. A career site has one primary goal: it should tell candidates why they want to work for you instead of anyone else.

The key word is “want.” As in, “I need a watch, but I want a Rolex.” Want fuels sales. Want is why people buy sports cars when all they need is a compact car. However, human resources concerns are often focused on needs – internal needs: we need to fill this position; we need someone with these skills. Clearly a shift in mind-set is required to change the model…to speak more effectively to the job seeker and potential candidate. And this is especially crucial if you wish to engage job seekers in the emerging Web 2.0, social media environments where dialogue and participation are key.

In my follow up post I will look at the four key elements crucial to engaging and firing up your audience and addressing what they want.