We are all aware of Google Ad Words – the short text based advertisments above and to the right of search engine result “organic” listings.
For basic keywords, like “Jobs” the cost can be as high as $5.00 per click. That’s a lot of dough when the vast majority of the traffic they get from the ads are job seekers that are not going to spend any money when visiting the advertised site. That adds up to a lot of money. There where over 185,000,000 searchs for the keyword “jobs” in August 2009. You can do the math on how much that would cost if someone did a month long campaign.
So why the heck would someone want to spend as much as $5.00 just to get job seekers to look at jobs. There are several reasons. Some good, some nepharious.
Good reasons:
1. An employer wants lots of people to apply to lots of different jobs they offer. They are so big that buying the “Jobs” keyword will pay off with lots of applications. This is rare since companies big enough to pay that much for a click are well known enough that they really don’t have to pay to advertise. People will just find them.
2. Job boards are running a campaign to get more people checking out their jobs.
3. Some other entity has information about the job market etc.
Bad reasons:
Web sites want your information. When you click on the link, you are taken to a “registration” form. A lot of information about you is valuable to marketers and thieves.
Note: Not it’s possible that in some instances legitimate Web sites with real jobs have ads that take you to registration links. Often times you might want to post your resume on their site anyway. So, the best way to get past the registration is to slice off all the crap after the basic Web address and see what the front page looks like. If you still get all kinds of things about registering, it’s probably a BAD JOB BOARD (or imitation job board).
Just in case you don’t know what I mean about basic Web address, when you see something like:
http://aaa.com?dkjkdjfkj&dslfjsdf=dddkkd&dd-3333-=222 etc. in the address or location bar, just cut out everything after the “.com” (or .biz,.net,org,ru,uk, etc.).
Also note: It doesn’t cost any money to have you ad appear in keyword results pages. Companies pay when someone clicks on the ad. So seeing ads in search results for something like “Rochester Part Time Floor Sweeper Job” is not be too much of a surprise.
The main thing to remember is that if you strip off all the garbage after the basic URL and the site still seems questionable, hit the browser back button and return the the search results.
