Who it is for
PPC for recruitment: two audiences, and only one of them pays a fee
A recruitment agency has two audiences on Google, candidates and employers, and a Google Ads account that does not separate them spends the employer budget on job seekers. Candidate searches are served by the job boards and Google's own job listings, free, above the ads; employer searches for an agency in your sector are the searches that turn into fees. We manage Google Ads for recruitment agencies from the Growth tier at £399 a month, built around employer enquiries and, where your CRM allows it, taught by the placements that came from them.
Two audiences
Why the candidate side of Google is not worth paying for, and the employer side is
The same account, two very different auctions. The table is why the budget is built the way it is.
| Candidate searches | Employer searches | |
|---|---|---|
| What they type | A job title, a town, "jobs", "vacancies", "apply" | "Recruitment agency" plus a sector or a town, "temp staff", "headhunter", "staffing agency" |
| Who else answers | Job boards, Google's job listings feature, the employer's own site, all free to the searcher | Other agencies, a few directories |
| What a click is worth | An application, which is a cost until it is placed | A vacancy to fill, which is a fee if you fill it |
| Where it goes wrong | Paying per click to send applicants to a job board listing you also pay for | Letting candidate searches into the campaign through broad match and close variants |
| Our approach | Not advertised, except a small brand campaign where your own name is being bid on by others | The whole budget: one campaign per sector or discipline, exact and phrase match, a negative list that starts with every job-seeker word |
Lead quality
An employer enquiry is not a lead until someone has read it
The form on a recruitment landing page is filled in by hiring managers, by candidates who could not find another button, by other agencies, and by people selling CRM software. Google counts all four as a conversion. So the form asks what a consultant asks first: are you hiring or looking, which role, how many, permanent or temporary, and where. The candidate path goes to your jobs page, and only the employer path is counted as the lead the bidding learns from.
Then the CRM closes the loop. The click ID is stored against the contact, and the stages you already record, vacancy taken, shortlist sent, placement made, go back to Google Ads as conversions with a value. Within a couple of months the bidding is buying the searches that produced vacancies you filled, not the ones that produced forms. That import is on the Scale tier, and the same mechanism is described in more depth on the B2B page.
The rules that touch the ads
Agency or employment business, said in the ad
The Conduct of Employment Agencies and Employment Businesses Regulations require an advertisement for a vacancy to identify the agency and to say whether it acts as an employment agency or an employment business. That applies if you ever do run a candidate-facing ad, and it is the reason our brand campaign copy carries the statement even when the vacancy itself is on your site. Employer-facing ads do not advertise vacancies, so the requirement does not bite, but the claims in them still fall under the CAP Code: a fill rate or a time-to-hire in a headline has to be a figure you can show.
Where the agency is a member of the REC or a sector body, that goes on the landing page rather than in the ad, because it reassures the employer at the point of enquiry and takes a headline slot in the ad that a service term uses better.
Structure
By discipline, by geography, with Microsoft Ads for the desk-bound half
A generalist agency is a losing bid against a specialist one, so campaigns are built by discipline: IT contract, engineering, care staff, finance, hospitality temps, each with its own landing page that names the roles, the typical time to a shortlist and the people who work that desk. Location targeting follows where you actually place: a national IT desk runs UK-wide with presence targeting, a care-staff desk runs on the towns the carers can reach.
Hiring managers search from a desk in office hours, which is also where Bing lives, so Microsoft Ads is imported from the cleaned Google account with a small budget and its LinkedIn profile targeting switched on, so that a search from a company in your target industry or from someone with a hiring title bids higher. The ad schedule on both follows the working day; the searches after 7pm are candidates.
Reporting
Cost per vacancy taken on, and eventually cost per placement
The report for an agency leads with employer enquiries by desk, the share that became a vacancy you took on, the cost per vacancy, and once the CRM has enough history, the cost per placement against the average fee. Form fills and clicks are on the second page, where they belong. Where the report cannot show the placement line because the CRM does not store the click ID, it says so, and setting that up is usually the first change we ask for.
The negative keyword list a recruitment account starts with is generated by our free tool at competitorwatch.xyz; type your sector and it returns the job-seeker words. It is public, so you can judge the thinking before you pay for it.
Related
Where this connects
PPC for B2B
Offline conversion import in full: the loop that teaches the account which leads were real.
Microsoft Ads management
The second engine, with the LinkedIn targeting recruiters use.
Pricing
Growth to start; Scale when the CRM import goes in.
Get a quote
Your desks, your CRM and your average fee; the plan in reply.
Questions from recruitment agencies
Should a recruitment agency advertise to candidates or to employers on Google?
Employers, in almost every case. Candidate searches are answered by the job boards and by Google's own job listings feature, which sit above the ads and cost the candidate nothing; paying per click to compete with them is expensive and produces applicants, not revenue. An employer searching for an agency in your sector is a fee, and that search is where the budget goes.
How do you keep job seekers out of an employer campaign?
By negative keywords from day one (jobs, vacancies, salary, apply, CV, careers, hiring near me) and by reading the Search Terms report every week, because candidates find new ways to phrase a job search every month. Match types at phrase and exact on the money terms, so the account matches what employers type rather than what Google thinks is close.
Our fee comes months after the enquiry. How can the account learn from that?
By importing the earlier stages. A vacancy taken on is a conversion within days; a shortlist sent within weeks; a placement inside the ninety-day window some of the time. Each stage goes back into Google Ads against the click that started it, with a value set from how often that stage becomes a fee, so the bidding learns from qualified employer enquiries rather than from form fills.
Do you run LinkedIn ads for recruiters?
No. Microsoft Ads lets us adjust search bids by the searcher's LinkedIn company, industry and job function, which reaches hiring managers when they search rather than when they scroll; we run that. LinkedIn's own advertising is a different product and a different budget.
What does PPC for a recruitment agency cost with you?
A flat fee by spend band: £249 a month up to £1,000 of spend, £399 up to £3,000, £599 up to £8,000. Agencies with a CRM that stores the click ID sit on Scale for the offline import; the rest start on Growth. One agency per sector and area on the monthly plans.
Tell us your desks, your CRM and your average fee. The reply sets out the campaigns and the import.
If the account is already running, add the customer ID and the reply also shows how much of last quarter's spend went on searches with jobs, apply or salary in them.