Contextual advertising as a tool for finding personnel

Recently, the labor market has been characterized by rather low stability. There is a high turnover of personnel, a shortage of specialists in one area or another. This is especially true for areas that require physical labor. Practice shows that it is becoming increasingly difficult for employers to find personnel for themselves. Different areas and tools are used to implement the tasks. And in many situations, the use of contextual advertising will help to ensure a good result in the shortest possible time.

More and more attention has recently been paid to this area, since the target, on which the main emphasis was concentrated in previous years, is losing ground. There is a gradual but steady rise in the price of traffic and competition for it. The latter has become especially evident after Western social networks left the Russian market en masse. That is, there is simply nowhere to place advertising, although business demand for promotion remains at a fairly high level.

As part of today's review, we will dwell in more detail on what contextual advertising is as such. We will talk about the channels through which it can be launched today. We will tell you how to correctly set a budget for a week and provide a number of recommendations that will allow you to minimize material costs for contextual advertising in the context of personnel search. We will give one example of using this strategy, which has proven itself to be excellent in practice. We will tell you how to bypass existing regional restrictions using a tool such as mobile proxies.

Briefly about the principles of contextual advertising

Contextual advertising is a fairly popular type of paid promotion of goods and services on the Internet, which involves displaying ads in browser search results based on the keywords that users enter in the search bar. Surely, each of you has already seen such advertising personally. As soon as you start the search process in the browser, a selection of sites corresponding to the entered query will appear on your screen, and the corresponding advertisements will be displayed above them. Due to the fact that such ads appear on pages with relevant content, a business can attract new customers to its official pages. That is, contextual advertising in each specific case will display user queries in a certain time interval. There will be no unnecessary information here.

The high efficiency of such campaigns is also due to the ability to attract people again, including those who were interested in the product or service, but for a number of reasons never placed an order. Also, a correctly chosen strategy helps to significantly increase traffic to the site. Here, the situation is the same as with organic search results: when searching for the product they need, users very rarely go further than the first page of results. This means that sites in the TOP attract more than 90% of potential customers. Contextual advertising will be in these positions. The only difference from organic promotion here is that business representatives will have to pay for the publication of such ads.

Today, there are 2 main types of contextual advertising:

1. Search. Involves the publication of ads in response to relevant user queries. Displayed at the top of search results. We talked about this above. You can tell that this is not an organic search result by the “Advertisement” mark, which will be placed directly next to the ad itself.
2. Contextual media. Such advertising is supplemented with pictures or videos for faster and more accurate perception. It can be launched as a banner ad, that is, contain an image and be published on partner sites, or as a product ad, made in the form of a classic product card, which will be displayed at the top of the search results. Recently, video advertising has also been often used, containing a hyperlink to the official website of the business, as well as advertising in app stores.

In its classic solution, contextual advertising is designed to solve a fairly large number of problems facing businesses. In particular, it helps to attract the target audience to the site, and very quickly, literally in the first minutes after publication. And this is the first "plus" in favor of the fact that it should be used when it is necessary to find personnel in the shortest possible time. And contextual advertising can also improve the site's performance in search results, as it increases traffic to the site, improves behavioral factors. With its help, they increase brand awareness, remind about themselves to those who have already used certain services, goods of the business. As a result, a competently launched campaign can significantly increase the number of sales of goods, services, ensure an increase in conversion on the site. All this is also relevant for the labor market.

The main problem here is to do all the work as correctly and correctly as possible. One of the most important aspects is the choice of a suitable service for launching a campaign and an advertising channel, in particular. We will talk about the solutions that Russian businesses have at their disposal today.

Getting to Know Modern Advertising Services

Modern Russian businesses have two main advertising services that bear the maximum load today. We are talking about the Yandex Advertising System (YAN) and the advertising service of the VKontakte social network, namely VK Ads. In both cases, users can choose from a fairly wide range of advertising channels with the ability to sort the user audience by interests based on more than a hundred parameters. There is also detailed analytics, using which you can easily monitor the effectiveness of launched strategies and promptly respond to figures, thereby saving on the advertising budget. All work is carried out through a personal account, which greatly simplifies the entire management process.

The fact that European services left the Russian market gave an accelerated start to the development of YAN and VK Ads. They continue to improve, expand, new tools and ad formats appear. Today, the existing analytics system is being actively improved and transformed. In particular, there are such tools as “Metrics”, BI-system DataLens, etc. And many who have already worked with these services note how quickly and professionally the technical support service has become. Users really do get answers to their requests, and quite quickly.

So, if we talk about the Yandex advertising system, it takes an ad and then determines the audience for which the corresponding goods, services, including publications about recruitment, would be useful. At the same time, approximate click-through rates and competitors' rates are automatically assessed. Based on the data received, a forecast is made about the feasibility of launching such advertising. As a result, you can filter out ads with low rates, and bet on those that can give the maximum result in practice. It is noteworthy that the same Yandex Direct is interested in publishing only relevant advertising. This is what allows you to launch contextual advertising that will provide the highest possible user traffic rates and bring maximum profit not only to the customer, but also directly to Yandex itself.

And here it is necessary to place the main emphasis on one significant BUT: high results can only be achieved if you, as a business representative, can create a competent advertisement relevant to user queries.

The main competitor of the Yandex Advertising System, the VK Ads platform, also has a number of interesting features. In particular, if a user goes to a platform with an ad, the system will automatically hold an auction in real time among all the ads present in this segment, focusing on the context of his request. As a result, only those advertisers whose publications in practice have shown higher results in comparison with competitors will be selected. Such an auction is based on the eCPM model. It assumes that in the process of comparing different ads, the system focuses on impressions, events, clicks and a number of other target actions, determining the effectiveness of each of them and all advertising as a whole.

VK Ads also has its own nuances in terms of determining the rate for publishing an ad. The business representative who wins the auction must pay for showing his ad the amount that his closest competitor announced. That is, the rate is taken from the position that took 2nd place. Thanks to this, it became possible to optimize the advertising budget and not overpay for impressions.

And if we compare YAN and VK Ads, then the advantages of the latter option include:

• cheaper traffic, which allows you to attract the same number of users with significant material savings;
• good coverage of the user audience, including not only users of the VKontakte social network, but also many others
• you can attract advertising not only to the official website of the business, but also to the lead form in literally 3 clicks;
• adding the myTarget platform to the VK Advertising ecosystem, which involves combining technologies, expanding capabilities already in a fairly close perspective.

But when working with VK Ads, you will most likely encounter a fairly significant problem. In particular, here, for the most part, a more “cold” audience is represented. This means that it will be necessary to show your creativity to the maximum, a creative approach in order to attract a user audience, and in this case, job seekers.

Budget planning is one of the important aspects in launching an advertising campaign. How to do everything here as correctly as possible - read on.

Setting an advertising budget for a week

At the stage of its development, the Yandex Advertising System is becoming more and more intelligent. It seeks to understand what specific target actions a particular advertising campaign implies, such as calling managers, sending a feedback form, clicking on a button to go to a site, or a full range of such actions. An automated strategy is used to implement these tasks. The point here is to perform the correct settings, and then track all the data and automatically transfer it to Yandex Metrica. Also, the goal that needs to be achieved is set and the budget within which this should be implemented is indicated.

Based on all this, the advertising budget is determined. Let's assume that you want to ensure the transition of the target audience to your site and are ready to pay 500 rubles for each such action. At the same time, you would like to get 50 such achievements per week within the framework of your advertising campaign. As a result, you include in the budget the amount of 500x50 = 25,000 rubles. You should also add 20% VAT. That is, your weekly advertising budget in this case will be 30,000 rubles.

Next, the YAN algorithms come into play, suggesting the selection of different tools and methods that allow you to get the desired conversion rates within this amount. On average, given the fact that the system is learning, reaching the desired indicators takes from 1 to 2 weeks. But still, to build a stable and effective strategy in work when interacting with advertising platforms, it will take on average up to six months, and in some cases - about 3 months. You can increase the effectiveness in this case and ensure the desired result if you use the following recommendations:

• When developing creatives, focus on retargeting. In this case, we are talking about using a marketing mechanism that will direct your online advertising to users who have already contacted your company or product, visited the site, left requests for a call back, or added products to the cart, but never placed an order. This can be implemented through search engines, social networks, forums, and, in this case, through advertising platforms. Retargeting will be triggered in response to a certain user action on the network: the identifier is saved in the browser's cookie files or transmitted directly to the resource. The user identifier can also be loaded directly into the database of your site. That is, in this case, the Advertising Campaign will involve re-displaying the ad, as if stimulating users to further perform targeted actions.
• Develop new creatives within the ad group. This can be both text and graphic content. It is also recommended to run A/B testing. We are talking about experiments in which potential clients are shown different versions of advertising, and then their reaction is assessed. This determines the effectiveness of a particular ad. To improve the quality of testing a single creative, ad or an entire advertising bundle, an advertising budget equal to the amount of attracting one lead is usually spent. That is, in this case, your work will be aimed at identifying an advertising campaign option that gives the best conversion rates for the purpose of subsequent scaling and use in other ads to obtain maximum profit. This is what will allow you to exclude the burnout of successful creatives.
• Focus exclusively on high-quality advertising campaigns. It is necessary to understand that the modern market is too saturated with such ads. And this is in parallel with the fact that people have already become accustomed to advertising, they react weakly to it. And here it is necessary to create a product that would effectively highlight your publications against the background of competitors, make them such that the user audience would pay attention to them. This can be implemented by adding extensions to text and graphic publications. In particular, these can be quick links and short descriptions for them, display links, business cards, original pictures, etc.
• Experiment with new ad formats. We have already mentioned above that in the context of contextual advertising, videos containing a link to the official website of a business have recently begun to gain popularity. This is a fairly new technology in this area. Today, it is interesting to the audience, which increases the effectiveness of the advertising campaign as a whole.
• Use modern neural networks to generate unusual pictures, prepare text creatives. It is clearly not worth completely relying on the capabilities of artificial intelligence, but it can still provide significant assistance in finding original ideas. By the way, today virtual AI bloggers are already actively used, attracting millions of audiences to their pages. This suggests that neural networks continue to expand, improve, and learn. So why not take advantage of the opportunities they provide for developing advertising creatives, including attracting personnel.

It is in your interests to plan your advertising campaigns for the long term. So that they work constantly, without interruption. So that one creative is replaced by another. In the event that you use automated strategies and stop them for one reason or another within 7 days, the machine will have to retrain, which will require additional time. In this case, the cost of the target action will return to its original position. This is relevant for those cases when you stop your advertising manually or when the advertising budget is exhausted. Therefore, it is necessary to calculate it correctly and replenish the balance in a timely manner. You must raise that building such an advertising strategy that will achieve maximum results in practice is not only your goal, but also the advertising platform itself. The relationship here is quite simple: you earn money, and Yandex earns from you.

How to reduce the cost of recruiting personnel?

In the process of running an advertising campaign, not only the neural network itself, as an option for the same Yandex, should be trained, but also you, as a person working with this product. Alternatively, write down all the edits that you make to your advertising and directly to the business website. If you analyze them from time to time, you will see those strategies that have given good results in practice and highlight failed solutions, thereby eliminating the use of such strategies in the future. Today, A/B testing has proven itself to be effective, as we have already discussed above.

But the effectiveness of an advertising campaign is a rather subjective parameter. Here you need to focus not only on achieving your goals, but also on the budget within which you managed to achieve such a result. We suggest you familiarize yourself with the recommendations that will allow you to minimize investments in advertising for the recruitment of employees without compromising its quality:

1. Work on the brand itself. The main goal of any advertising, regardless of whether you are attracting buyers of your goods, customers of services or working on finding new employees is to inspire trust from the audience. Against the background of a large number of competitors, many brands lose their face, merge with the general mass. And in such conditions, only a strong brand can achieve good results, in this case, the employer's company. Therefore, regularly monitor the reviews of people who previously worked for you, show how your business is structured, how it works, what privileges it provides for employees. Show how comfortable it will be to work for you even without being tied to a salary. And here it is important to choose a concept that would work in your case. A good option may be to bet on the stability and prospects of business development, career growth. You can also focus on the proximity of work to home or the possibility of remote work, which will save the personal time of employees. But in any case, material involvement always works. As an example, we can name one of the hotels on the sea coast, which hired employees for the holiday season. The advertising conditions stated that if a certain person worked for 5 months, he would additionally receive a sixth salary. The strategy worked perfectly. The business did not have to look for additional staff throughout the season, conduct training, and people received a good increase in salary.
2. Increase the convenience of interaction with your advertisements and business in general for people. Do not take decisions that require additional effort from people. As an option, preparing a professional resume or a large cover letter, filling out an extensive questionnaire. This is what will prevent many applicants from interacting with you. This is despite the fact that most specialties do not require all this. Most of these resumes and questionnaires are just a standard technique that businesses themselves use without really understanding why they need it. Very often, all this is not even revealed, and applicants are simply invited to an interview and all the interesting points are clarified, so to speak, on the spot. You will increase your chances of finding personnel many times over if you make the simplest questionnaire possible, include such columns as full name, desired position, level of payment. This will be quite enough for you to understand whether this person is right for you and send him a corresponding letter with an invitation to an interview. It is on this basis that a decision on hiring will be made.
3. Optimize the work of your recruitment department. The main problem that companies face when hiring employees for mass vacancies is a fairly large number of requests. It takes time and resources to process them. As a result, it may turn out that the people you approved have already found a new job for themselves during this period and you will have to process the applications again. You can significantly simplify all this and optimize the recruitment process through specialized CRM services. Through them, you can manage all candidates, automatically collect analytics on them, add a rating sorting system. As a result, you will see a selection presented in the form of a table sorted by the parameters that are important to you, and you will be able to respond to applicants' requests as quickly as possible. In addition, here you can launch some kind of sales funnel of information products. Launch a chatbot that will take over the initial communication with applicants, answering the most common questions. In this case, your recruiting managers will be able to connect to interaction with people at later stages. Then, when most of the applicants automatically drop out, having identified discrepancies for themselves. Email newsletters can also be a good tool in this case.
4. Consider human psychology. Practice shows that in highly competitive niches, one ad will not be enough. That is, if you write in your contextual advertising that you need, for example, a waiter for a new restaurant, you will attract very few people. The fact is that you do not give specifics and your publication simply goes unnoticed. If you add the restaurant address, expected salary, work schedule, indicate the possibility to choose shifts that suit you, use the restaurant services at a discount or guarantee free meals during the work shift, then you will attract increased attention to your vacancy. You should understand that both your advertisement itself and the website that people will go to via it are the face of your company. Your recruitment managers should complement all of this. Their competence, ability to convey the main idea, and to arouse the favor of potential applicants are what will give amazing results in practice.

In this case, you should understand that choosing a job, even a seasonal one, is a rather important decision for each person. And in order to get employees, you must offer them the most comfortable working conditions and appropriate pay.

How contextual advertising works in terms of employee recruitment using an example

As an example, let's consider the task that one of the agencies specializing in recruiting personnel faced. In particular, it was necessary to recruit a group of people to work on a rotational basis at a distance of 250 km from the region of residence with the minimization of the costs of attracting each specialist.

In this case, the work began with a preparatory stage, within the framework of which a portrait of the target audience was compiled. In particular, these should be men aged 25 to 50 years, ready to work on a rotational basis at a construction site. That is, those who are initially set up for physical labor. At the same time, people who had previously traveled on a rotational basis, but to the northern regions, were automatically excluded. The reason here is lower wages. Also at this stage, a unique selling proposition was drawn up, including free travel, accommodation, three meals a day, special clothing, and medical care. In this case, people of other nationalities were not excluded. A mandatory condition here was the availability of all necessary documents.

At the next stage, the closest competitors were studied and a semantic core was collected. Advertisements were developed based on the information received. As a result, quizzes, offers, and banners were used. The YAN platform was chosen to launch the advertisement. Within the framework of this project, it was necessary to hire 300 people. Half of the vacancies were closed in the first 3 weeks. At the same time, the weekly budget was 10,000 rubles.

At the next stage of the advertising campaign, 2 more strategies were additionally implemented, which involved expanding the geography of advertising. By the end of the second month, the project was completely closed. At the same time, the advertising budget for the week began to noticeably decrease by about 1,000 rubles for each period, that is, the price of one application gradually decreased. Moreover, within the initial geography, there was a stable flow of leads in the future, which allowed us to close other projects of a similar plan.

All this showed in practice that the artificial intelligence of the Yandex Advertising System learned well in 2 months. That is, thanks to this, it was possible to get excellent results, but at a significantly lower price.

Let's sum it up

In the conditions in which the modern advertising market in Russia has found itself, contextual advertising rightfully occupies a leading position. But in any case, it is necessary to approach the development and implementation of a strategy as comprehensively, professionally, and creatively as possible. Yes, artificial intelligence, which is actively being introduced into various advertising platforms today, significantly simplifies these works. But still, it does not relieve you of the need to think, make the most balanced and reasonable decisions.

All the recommendations that we talked about in today's review can be used in other areas of business development, and not only in the field of attracting personnel. But to make your work as functional and convenient as possible, and to avoid various regional restrictions, we recommend that you additionally connect mobile proxies from the MobileProxy.Space service to your work. In this case, you will receive a reliable assistant that will hide your real IP-address and geolocation, which will allow you to create a confidential, secure connection to the Internet, effectively bypass regional blocking, and automate the same type of routine tasks, including collecting information about competitors and the text of strategies that they use in practice.

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