Just when you thought there were enough job search engines along comes Zamzim.
Parent company Workcircle, a UK-based job search engine claiming over 600,000 job listings, has been in its current iteration since 2006. Zimzam was officially launched in March 2008 to little fanfare in the States, but has apparently seen respectable growth.
We’re now going to up our US presence, said CEO Simon Appleton, “We figured out that Indeed and Simply Hired primarily scrape ATS systems and corporates to build traffic, whereas we’re an opt-in aggregator, based on job boards giving us feeds of their jobs. In fact, what we really are is a cost-effective way to buy PPC traffic for job boards.
“We think there’s space in the market for our service – we’re cheaper, simpler and more effective than buying PPC direct from the major search engines, and it certainly works here in the UK.” Cost-per-click will be “around 25 cents.” Indeed’s minimum bids start at 25 cents also, so Zimzam may have a tough time selling advertisers on the “cheaper” part.
On marketing, Appleton says,
We’ve got some pretty slick technology that allows us to drive contextual, deep-linked, long-tail PPC campaigns across the major search engines, adapting those campaigns in near real-time based on the inventory of jobs we have. So every night our system mines our jobs database (about 750,000 jobs currently, processing about 250,000 a week) and looks for trends, spikes, new sectors and so on. It automatically adjusts our campaigns on Google et al to reflect these, and adjusts the bids based on a complex ROI algorithm.
So if junior sales executives in London have a higher propensity to click out compared to senior sales execs, it’ll tend to bid higher for junior sales execs (depending on what the bidding on our internal auction is like). We make up to 60,000 changes to our campaigns through the Google API a day for instance, and sponsor around a million key words and phrases across the big search engines. And that’s just to drive traffic in the UK.
The company accepts job feeds from job boards and charges them a fee when a user clicks on their opening from a list of search results. The idea is not new and is being done by services like Top USA Jobs and to a similar degree Go Jobs.
The key, of course, for any offering like this is driving cost-effective, massive amounts of traffic. No simple task. But if they can do it, job sites will likely get on board. Not surprisingly, particularly as PPC costs from Web search engines like Google continue to escalate, job sites are looking for altermatives to promote themselves and their content.
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