Last week, I commented on SimplyHired’s increased pay-per-click (PPC) advertising campaign on Yahoo!’s network. When I wrote that article, SimplyHired had yet to do likewise on Google’s PPC solution.
As seen in the Google results image below, that’s changed:
It’s a bit tougher to decipher what a top three bid for "San Francisco jobs" is paying on Google because it’s a combination of bid price and ad popularity, so just use your imagination. Somewhere between 50 cents and $1 per click, I’d guess.
Additionally, it looks like Oodle, a similar service to vertical job search, is following SimplyHired’s lead, although Oodle has been testing the waters on Google’s PPC solution for awhile.
I find it odd that two free services such as Oodle and SimplyHired are two of the top spenders on Google for job searches in San Francisco.
Hmm, come to think of it, isn’t San Fran Google’s backyard?
Their spending couldn’t have anything to do with getting Google’s attention for acquisition purposes, could it?
September 7th, 2005 at 4:07 pm
I would think (and I could very well be wrong) that the guys at Google who need to know about what is going on in the online recruiting arena read the blogs and know about simply hired. I don’t think that simplyhired would spend big money to attract the attention of google on their own site. would they?
September 7th, 2005 at 6:14 pm
I agree with Jason, can’t see the need although they use different technology to Indeed and Workzoo that appear to use ‘Google in a box’; not sure if this mens anything!
I do wonder what their business model is though. Am I missing something? Or do they hope to replace job boards by going direct to employer and agency sites to get the jobs and miss out the job boards? Is this the end of Monster??
C’mon Joel, you must have some on this?
September 8th, 2005 at 12:43 pm
So SimplyHired or Oodle or Indeed or others have something that Google cannot develop on their own? (or already has?) Stop, please!
“Stupid Internet Investments - The Sequel” is coming soon.
If Google acquires anything in the jobs space it will be Monster, combining paid job postings and resume searching with sponsored job search results linked to company website career centers.
Yahoo! & HotJobs
MSN & Career Builder
Google & Monster???
September 8th, 2005 at 6:57 pm
Hi Joel,
I just interviewed Faith Seldin yesterday for Landed.fm - we talked about the integration of Google’s map api into oodle. - and, of course, right now oodle makes its $ with Google Adsense.
When I was researching oodle for the interview, found this on Ester Dyson’s Flickr site:
“Faith Sedlin and Craig Donato of Oodle, an aggregator/indexer of classifieds… or are they really an aggregator/indexer of consumer demand? Whatever, they are growing fast, and led by some of the team (also including Flickr investr Brett Bullington) that helped build Excite in the good old days. What’s interesting (to me, at least) is the growing role of alerts and notifications in such businesses …. and how much subtlety there is to building an effective, appealing notification tool that keeps users coming back.”
I think a lot of the appeal of oodle is the very detailed level of information you can include in your alert notice.
September 19th, 2005 at 1:30 am
Business Week had a recent article entitled “Jobs Sites — The Second Generation.” It featured mkt10, the firm started by the team that originally made CareerBuilder then sold it to Gannett (the company that owns Knight-Ridder, USA Today, among other newspapers.)
See http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/sep2005/tc2005097_9273_tc057.htm
October 24th, 2005 at 4:58 pm
Google is bad for small business which it forces to blow money on PPC advertising by penalizing it on rankings. This is a result of G placing too much weight on the number of incoming links. Old crappy Korean Wat era sites with 2000 incoming show up on G’s first SERP. Meanwhile fresh new sites with far better content but only a few links show up on G’s 90th SERP.