Everything You Need to Know to Optimize Your Budget on Indeed
While we’re all for strategically incorporating sponsored listings into your overall sourcing strategy, it’s become all too common for employers to simply throw money at the problem and hope for the best.
While this strategy will likely give you an easy boost to your number of applicants, it’s also a great way to burn through your budget. That’s why, when we analyze a new client’s Indeed spend, we want to ensure they’re getting the most from every penny in their Indeed budget. We recognize that you don’t need to spend more to get more out of Indeed. You just need to know a few things:
1. Know your options
When job seekers search for a job on Indeed, they see a mix of both sponsored and non-sponsored job postings. Non-sponsored listings are fed through a “job feed” from the applicant tracking system to the Indeed platform, and while you don’t need to pay to have your posting appear on Indeed, non-sponsored (free) listings move down in the search results as newer, relevant listings appear.
Sponsored listings, on the other hand, remain displayed at the top and bottom of each search result page. Because of their prominent placement, sponsored listings get up to 5X more clicks than their non-sponsored counterparts.
If you decide to go the sponsored route, you will be faced with another set of important options. When you launch a paid campaign, you can choose to use either their “Simple” or “Advanced” pricing model. The Simple model asks you only to set a daily or monthly budget that renews automatically. From there, Indeed’s algorithm determines how much you’ll pay per click based on what others are paying to appear prominently in related search results.
The Advanced model allows you to set a total, one-time budget and a maximum cost-per-click. This option gives you complete control over how your budget is spent, but depending on your maximum bid, your sponsored listing may not appear as prominently as others.
Whether or not you ultimately decide to sponsor a listing, you need to know the options that are available to you and how those options will affect the outcome of your Indeed strategy.
2. Know your budget
Optimizing your sponsored job posting is possible, but it takes finesse. There is a science to the PPC model, and while Indeed offers some budget guidance, it’s easy to end up spending more than necessary, especially if the pay-per-click model is new to you.
Keep in mind that some job listings will cost more to sponsor than others, and that cost will vary wildly based on industry, location, and individual listing. If there are many employers competing to have their job appear at the top of the search results, you’ll need to shell out more cash per click to have your listing appear prominently. While most listings will cost you less than $1.50 per click, others cost up to $5.00 per click.
That’s why you’ll want to set a total budget per listing and stick to it. Know how much you’re willing to spend per click, and track your ROI over time. Fortunately, Indeed will give you an estimate for how many applicants you can expect to receive when you launch a sponsored campaign, allowing you to make better budget decisions from the start.
Obviously, that begs the next question, “How do you most effectively spend your budget?” Which listings do you sponsor? Do you just sponsor everything, cross your fingers, and hope for the best?
3. Know your position
The best way to determine how to best spend your budget is by knowing your position within the overall job market.
You need to know which of your open positions are the most difficult to fill. Take a careful look at the number of openings for each position, how long they’ve been open, the type of candidate you’ll need, and the location to determine which positions are higher on your priority list.
Generally, if you are looking for highly specialized talent, need to hire a large number of people to fill a role, or have struggled to find the right candidate in the past, you will likely have a tougher time filling those positions. That’s where sponsored listings can give you a much-needed boost to your pool of qualified applicants.
Remember, the key to success is strategy. We don’t want you to spend more. We want you to spend wisely.
Optimizing Your Sponsored Listings Strategy
Creating a strategy that optimizes paid and free options on the Indeed platform may be complex, but the fundamentals are simple. Know your options. Know your budget. And know your position in the market.
Want more information? Insight on an existing challenge? An outside perspective on an internal issue? Contact Wicresoft’s full-service Talent Acquisition Services experts, specializing in advisory, solutions, and operations, to improve all aspects of the talent management practice. We will help you get the results you’re looking for, after all, getting results is what we do best.
