[Recruitment Advertising Essentials]: How to Retarget Candidates with your Job Ads on the World Wide Web

What is retargeting?

Retargeting is a form of digital recruitment advertising that enables you to showcase your ads to your target audience after they’ve visited your website and left.

A large majority of users typically don’t convert on their first visit to a website. Retargeting allows you to reach and re-engage with these users with highly relevant ads – ensuring a larger percentage of them convert (to your desired outcome), while also significantly enhancing your brand recall and boosting advertising ROI.

As a consumer, you’re probably very familiar with this experience.

Maybe you visited a travel blog about cool places to visit before you die . . . and suddenly, you start seeing ads from that travel site – everywhere you go on the Internet – about cheap flights to popular destinations!

That’s retargeting for you.

How does retargeting apply to job ads?

Retargeting for ads for recruitment is not too different from how it works in the consumer advertising world.

Most candidates don’t fill out your job application the first time they visit your career site. A lot of them abandon the job application midway.

Potential job seekers that have searched for jobs you’re hiring for, visited your career site, or partially / completely filled your job application for an open position, can be “retargeted” with your job ads for similar roles, either right away or in the future. This means you can set up your job ads to pursue them, wherever they go on the World Wide Web – whether it’s on the over 2 million Google Display partner sites that reach 90% of the world’s internet users, or on Facebook.

As your potential candidates browse the internet, you can retarget them with display ads (retargeting banner ads) that inform or remind them about existing job openings at your company, or keep your employment brand top-of-mind.

Benefits of retargeting

Retargeting is an extremely powerful tool for conversion optimization as well as branding. This translates to the following advantages:

• Increase relevance and reduce costs: Retargeting is a very cost-effective form of job advertising that allows you to reach out to potential candidates that have already expressed interest in your brand. With retargeting, you’re limiting your audience to a fixed size, but at the same time, increasing its relevance based on data.As a result, retargeting job ads are known to have significantly higher click-to-apply conversion rates and lower costs per applicant (and costs per hire), when compared to regular job ads being viewed by candidates for the first time.
• Minimize candidate loss due to drop-offs: Let’s say you have a click-to-apply conversion rate of 10%. This means that 90% of prospective job seekers abandon your application halfway.Whatever their reasons might be for dropping off, in a majority of cases, all they need is an additional push to complete their applications. When you retarget these candidates with ads that direct them back to your site / job application – and motivate them to complete their applications – you’re getting back relevant candidates that you would have otherwise lost.
• Enhance your employment brand: If your employment brand is relatively less known, retargeting job seekers helps amplify it.Most job seekers may not remember your brand if they’ve only been to your career site once. With retargeting, your job ads (and brand) are constantly in front of relevant candidates. This helps massively with brand recall.
• Cross-device retargeting: Click-to-apply conversion rates for desktop users are often way higher than mobile users, especially if your job application process is complex, time-consuming, or not mobile-optimized.You can bridge this gap with cross-device retargeting, which is the practice of using cookies of mobile users to retarget them on desktops, where the chances of them converting to applications are much higher.

Types of retargeting

There are three main approaches you can use to create a retargeting campaign:

1. List-based retargeting: With this approach, you can target relevant job seekers by using their email addresses. These candidates could be sitting in your applicant tracking system (ATS) as they may have applied to a specific job opening or similar ones in the past.You can further personalize campaigns by creatively filtering your lists. For example, you can run separate job ads for candidates that “declined an offer” or had a “salary requirement mismatch.”
2. Pixel-based retargeting: With this approach, you can add a pixel (code) to specific web pages, such as ones on your career site or your job application, to track and advertise to job seekers that visit these pages or don’t complete applications.Every time a job seeker visits a page with a pixel on it, the pixel directs a cookie to be placed in his / her browser. Once the candidate leaves your site or job application midway, this cookie informs your retargeting platform to show particular ads based on his / her browsing patterns.
3. Search retargeting: With this approach, you can serve display ads to users based on their search behaviour. If a candidate searches for a job you’re hiring for, or uses keywords relevant to one of your job openings, you can serve him / her display ads as he / she browses the web – outside of the search results.For instance, if you are looking for a “Senior Sales Analyst,” you can serve relevant display ads to people that have searched for “sales analyst jobs,” “sales analytics manager,” or even “senior sales analyst salary.” The advantage of this approach is that it leverages intent to connect with relevant, in-market candidates.

The Joveo platform enables all forms of retargeting at scale – with end-to-end automation and visibility from click to application to hire – enabling you to attract significantly more relevant applicants, increase conversions, reduce cost per applicant (as well as cost per hire), and bolster your employment brand, while saving your recruitment advertising team a huge amount of time and resources.

To learn more about how you can enhance your recruitment advertising efforts (with programmatic job advertising, targeting and retargeting job seekers on the whole World Wide Web, and more), fill out this form or send me a message at [email protected] – I would love to connect!