Driving Traffic and Targeting | Online Marketing For Recruiters

What Does Driving Traffic Mean?

Driving traffic is basically getting people to visit your agency online, whether that be looking at or engaging with your social media profile and posts, or preferably and more often the topic, visiting your website.

Hot and Cold Traffic

A traffic source or channel, whether it be for attracting new visitors or for bringing back previous ones, can be traditionally described as hot or cold depending on how likely the visitors coming from it are to convert to customers or leads, in the case of recruitment, this would be candidates or clients.

Hot traffic can be achieved by warming up originally cold visitors with a strong remarketing strategy to bring them back. This can be done by identifying their needs and narrowing in on them with more refined ads using focused custom audience targeting or email lists.

A person may potentially start as cold traffic by just clicking on a blog article in their news feed, simply because you shared it in a group they are in, and over time, convert to a client or candidate through a warming up process.  This is normally achieved using remarketing and a marketing funnel.

Conversely, someone who visited the same blog entry and stayed on your website for less than 30 seconds is considerably colder than someone who finished the whole article and had a poke around after. So, it may be worth excluding these visitors from custom audiences and retargeting campaigns for now. It’s good to look for ways to weed out the weaker visitors like these to keep your audiences as hot as possible.

Some sources of new traffic may not necessarily need warming up to be considered hot though, if they are originally of high quality and intent. For example, if you run an ad on Google Search that only shows up when people type the exact match search term ‘Site Supervisor Job’ within a 10 mile radius of a position you have open with the same job title, that traffic would be red hot out of the gate, only attracting people already actively seeking out the job, possibly leading to a single session signup.

Good Targeting

Remember, it’s all about bringing the heat. The hotter the fresh traffic you bring in, the easier it will be to build upon and convert.

For example, if you were to advertise for a physio position in Melbourne on Facebook by simply targeting every Facebook user between 18 and 45 years old, within a 10 mile radius of your agency, the majority of action your ad will receive will mostly be from unqualified people of no value to your goals, engaging with the ad and clicking through to your website. This will dilute and pollute your audiences, cooling them down and making them a source of colder traffic in the future, rather than if you had focused on acquiring quality traffic in the first place.

Alternatively, when I Google ‘physio jobs in Melbourne’ I get one, super relevant ad for a recruitment company…

Because this is such a highly specific search term that these recruiters obviously focus on and value highly, this will very much be a source of top quality, new traffic, full of high intent, convertible visitors for this agency. In other words, red hot! For sure you will get a lot less visitors with this traffic source than the previously mentioned, broadly targeted Facebook ad and likely end up paying more per each visitor your site receives, but these visitors will definitely be of considerably more value to you and as such, a better and hotter source of traffic and applicants.

From there, this agency can build custom audiences of visitors based on specific jobs, categories or pages they visited and then target them with highly relative ads to keep them coming back until they convert. Of course, they should definitely try and get them to sign up for jobs or automated job alerts as soon as possible too!

This one, high quality source of traffic may not be the busiest but can 100% help you build out strong audiences over time, driving more qualified traffic that will definitely lead to you filling positions and pleasing clients with a well optimised follow up strategy. Finding a few sources of fresh traffic like this is vital to filling your marketing funnel with quality people that are more likely to fall through the funnel and make you money.

This general but simple methodology carries over to client acquisition too, as well as every form of marketing. Start with high quality traffic, then qualify and segment your visitors for further, more refined targeting to get them on the phone.

If you find all of this is very intriguing but are left with a question or two then feel free to get in contact and hopefully, we can help clear things up. As well, we recommend checking out our other articles about online marketing for recruiters which will give you a more complete understanding.