Posting job ads for free on Google: no cost = no worth?

Advertising, google, Job Boards, Marketing, Search, Sourcing, Talent, Tools Add comments

Apr 092007

Most of the people I have talked with recently either haven’t heard or delved much into understanding the Google Base service. In a nutshell, Base is a free-of-charge classifieds-like space that enables advertisers load their ads in specific verticals: cars, houses, personals, jobs, etc. The idea as the google base blog explains it to posters is that

“based on your items’ relevance, users may find (your ads) in their results for searches on Froogle, Google Maps and even our main Google web search”

(further down in the same page, the Base Reach description actually does away with the “gogle web search” part so there’s a bit of a mixed message there)

This is not just catered for the one-ad pusher: the site has instructions for advertisers with serious volumes. And obviously, this is not part of a charity program; more content (from posters) produces more pages and pageviews (for/from the user) which produces more ad view opportunities (for Google’s paying advertisers) and more ad revenue (for Google).

Effectively, when you do a search on Google, it is not evident yet that Base results are coming up as natural or sponsored results. Yet. Instead, if you want to see Base listings you have to go to the Base search page (if you are in the know of something different, yell). This is understandable as it is expected that a service like this will create contention between Google and its advertisers as it effectively competes with them; the issue tails onto Google advertisers’ own clients, who in theory at least, could effectively load up classifieds directly to Google. So, this is clearly disruptive.

Somehow or other, I see the contention going away, whether it is through sheer muscle or via a compromise that assures advertisers that they are still getting their money’s worth. In this context, it will be interesting to see what is the service take up once Google goes all out on it and how it is featured to complement the current advertiser services.

At this stage of the game I would venture that free classifieds are not going away. The obvious fact is that advertisers do not pay to just blast data online, but to attract the right audience. You may say that this is the core reason why you still want to pay a job board for ad posting or (may be less so) for a print ad in the paper: because they get you the right individuals. If not, well they need to try harder for you.

Among early Base adopters in Australia, I was able to see today that sites like Careerone and Nowhiring, posting on behalf of their own clients with the aim of further reaching the available channels to look for talent on the web. Who will be the first agency to use Base locally?

http://www.NowHiring.com.au Brett

Hey Jorge

Yes as you mentioned we have been posting to Base for nearly a year now but very disappointing results. Base doesn’t seem to get any traffic and we certainly haven’t been bowled over by click throughs.

Cheers
Brett
jorge

Brett, i guess the low CTR will be no surprise to you. Base looks like google’s well hidden ugly child, nowhere to be found.

Do you continue posting after a year because the marginal cost is nil? or do you have hopes for the channel?
Carey

As Craigslist has pointed out so well, there’s no such thing as free classifieds. There are only temporarily free classifieds.

A friend of mine in Silicon Valley tells me Google Base is not so much a classifieds play as a data infrastructure play. When you think about it, this makes sense – the more data is structured to Google’s criteria, the better Google will be able to work its algorithms at an advantage to Microsoft / Yahoo and potential pretenders.

In Australia, various types of arithmetic do not work in Google’s favour in the employment space.

There is only x amount of space on the Google search results – x number of ‘free’ ads and x number of paid ads. What will the price of each paid ad have to be for Google to recover its costs assuming that x remains at 8?

Integrating classifieds ads into the main section is only economically feasible if you can get a higher yield for your ‘vertical’ ads than your main ads. Is this achievable with 250,000 possible listings when 90% have to be ‘free’?

With the low volume of jobs in Australia compared to the number of possible Google results, I’m not sure the economic arithmetic adds up for Google here.

Thirdly, the number of advertisers feeds to anyone in this market can be counted. Assuming all of these feeders decide to simultenously feed the Google machine through Base, the total number of jobs on Google will still not match the consumer appeal of players already in the market. Many of the jobs on the current players are loaded directly / maunally to those sites, or are derivatives of newspaper inventories beyond the reach of Google’s spiders.

Lastly, my suspicion is that Google have bigger fish to fry – monetising Australian employment listings to the tune of what otherwise would be a rounding error in their accounts would not be my top priority if I were Mr Google.
jorge

Hi Carey, lots of equations do not close within our local market given size. Base’s dismal exposure/results though are certainly global phenomena, so there might be other motivations behind it – as you point out.

I wonder also if -locally- the repercussions of base’s ramp up would vary significantly depending on whether you are aggregator/portal (say a job board, or vertical engine) or a direct employer or agency with a jobs listing. The output might still be rounding error for google but maybe not so for local vendors and advertisers, who can also be interested in running away from the ‘volumes noise’ partly caused by the mass ad loads from garden-walled databases