The popular opinion is that Google doesn’t do any advertising; that the word-of-mouth machine alone drives their brand awareness and success. While their remarkability is undeniable, getting where they are sans advertising is not fact.
Google does advertise. They just do it a lot more cost effectively and intelligently than most.
How? Checkout a recent print ad:.
In red, you’ll notice a unique URL that I’ve circled. See how it doesn’t take a reader to just www.google.com or www.googleanalytics.com?
The domain, I would guess, is specific to this magazine. That way, Google has a good idea what their return on investment is and is it worth doing more ads like this in the future.
Every Sunday I skim the classifieds hoping to find an employment ad following a similar strategy, but I never find one. Doesn’t mean it’s not happening, but it certainly isn’t happening enough.
If you currently advertise in print, or any offline medium for that matter, are you calculating your ROI like Google does?
Popularity: 2% [?]
December 19th, 2006 at 10:06 am
Hi Joel,
I’ve seen this starting the last year in the recruitment industry in Belgium. Recruiters are using different reference numbers when placing there ads in our recruitment magazine (ref1),on our internet site (ref2), or those of our competitors (ref 3 till ..)
There’s quite some recruitmtent & selection agencies e.g. calculating from there not only the number of cv’s received via each medium, but also the number of candidates selected for a first interview, the number of candidates that are proposed to a client and the number of candidates that actually get a contract. These ratio’s (toghether with the price) really give them a great overview of the ROI of each medium…
Bye
Marianne – http://www.vacature.com – Belgium
December 19th, 2006 at 2:20 pm
Joel,
ATS’ do this all the time and have been doing it for years. It’s called sourcing.
December 22nd, 2006 at 4:27 pm
There is no doubt that Google is a PR department of high usage. But they also do a ton of job listing advertising (which based on the resumes they already receive is totally unecessary). Why do they do this? Branding.
To praise these campaigns as “efficient ROI” would be at best questionable and a complete assumption. In September, Google advertised in United Airlines magazine, only to have the link to the microsite not work for the first three weeks of the month.
http://daviddalka.com/createvalue/2006/09/23/google-recruiting-error-fixed/
In fact, if you click all the way to an actual job, there is no distinct URL coming from this microsite than if you just surfed in. I’d ask you to reconsider this post about ROI tracking because I think you are giving way too much credit here!!!
Happy Holidays!
Sincerely,
Dave aka, http://www.nextgoogleceo.com