Google Ads for a recruitment agency: candidates and clients are two campaigns, and one account for both wastes half the budget

A recruitment agency has two customers and Google sees one keyword. Recruitment agency Leeds is typed by a candidate who wants a job and by a business that wants to hire, and the agency is paid by the second while the first spends most of the budget. The fix is two campaigns: a client campaign built on hiring language, with every job-seeker word as a negative, and a candidate campaign only if the agency has live roles and can count applications, with the hiring words excluded from it. Each lands on its own page and each is judged on its own cost per result. One campaign for both is the most common fault we see in recruitment accounts, and it usually shows as a healthy click-through rate and an empty client pipeline.

The two searchers, and the words each one uses

The two columns overlap on exactly the phrases an agency bids on first: the sector plus recruitment, the town plus agency. That overlap is why the account cannot be left to one campaign. Google's matching, broad or phrase, will serve the client keyword to the candidate search because the words are the same, and the candidate clicks more often, so the campaign learns to find more candidates.

Why one campaign fails quietly

• Click-through rate looks good. Candidates click readily, so the ads earn a strong rate and a good Quality Score, and the account looks healthy on every surface except the one that pays.
• Smart bidding optimises towards the wrong person. If the only conversion the account counts is a form, and candidates fill the contact form asking about roles, Maximize Conversions learns to find candidates.
• The search terms report is dominated by jobs, salary and apply, and the weekly negatives routine becomes a losing fight, because the keyword itself invites them.
• The landing page serves two readers and persuades neither: a jobs board at the top for candidates, a hire-us line below it for employers, and both leave.

The client campaign

This is the campaign that pays, and it is built from the employer's language. Keywords by sector and role: engineering recruitment agency, hire a warehouse team, temporary staff for events, in phrase and exact match. The negative list is the whole candidate column above, applied as a shared list so every new ad group inherits it: jobs, vacancies, apply, salary, career, CV, hiring now, part time, near me, plus the job boards by name. The ads say what an employer wants to hear, time to shortlist, the sectors covered, the fee model if the agency is prepared to say it. The page is for employers only: the roles filled, the time to shortlist, a named consultant, a form that asks for the role and the start date, and the number.

Conversion actions: a call longer than a minute, and the employer form. Nothing else. If the agency also counts candidate registrations, keep them as secondary actions in a separate goal so bidding does not see them. The number that judges the campaign is cost per employer enquiry, and in the first month it will be higher than the agency hoped, because the clicks it declines were the cheap ones.

The candidate campaign, if there is one

Most agencies do not need to pay for candidates on Google; the job boards and the agency's own listings do that. Run a candidate campaign only when a client role is hard to fill and the agency can measure applications. Then it is a separate campaign, with its own budget, the job words as keywords, the employer words as negatives, and a landing page that is the live role with an application form, nothing else. Judge it on cost per completed application, and switch it off the day the role is filled. A candidate campaign that runs permanently is a jobs board the agency is renting from Google.

The quickest test of an existing account: open the search terms report for the last 90 days, sort by cost, and mark each row candidate or employer. If the candidate rows are the larger share of the spend, which is the usual picture in an account that was never split, the fix is a negative list and two campaigns, not a bigger budget.

The words that sit on both sides

Some phrases cannot be assigned. Recruitment agency plus a town, or an agency's own name, is typed by both readers, and no negative separates them. Two things do the work there. The ad speaks to the employer in its first headline, hire staff in a week or for employers who need a shortlist, so a candidate reading it sees it is not for them and does not click. And the page carries a line near the top, looking for a job, with a plain link to the agency's roles, which costs nothing and stops the candidate who did click from filling the employer form. The search terms report then shows which side each ambiguous phrase is really serving, in the ratio of employer enquiries to candidate clicks, and the bid follows that ratio rather than a guess.

Budget and the first ninety days

1. Start client-heavy: most of the budget on the client campaign, a small reserve for a candidate campaign if a role needs it.
2. Weeks one and two: the search terms report every two days; every candidate phrase that slips through becomes a negative. Expect the click-through rate to fall and the cost per click to rise. Both are the campaign getting cleaner.
3. Weeks three to six: the employer enquiries arrive in a trickle; read each one and record whether it was a real vacancy. The cost per qualified enquiry is the number, not the cost per form.
4. Day ninety: enough enquiries to compare sectors. The sector with the lowest cost per qualified enquiry gets the next budget; the sector with none is paused, not expanded.

The page for recruitment PPC describes how we run this for agencies and what the first quarter costs in time. The negatives list in the linked guide is the same list this guide rests on.