At the start of March, an industrial staffing agency saw its cost per application increase by 60 percent compared to its CPA in the month of February. Why? We’ll never know for sure, but we do know that apps per day were down by 25 percent and spend per day was up by 17 percent… not good!
On top of that, the main job board where this company was spending money reached out and suggested increasing the budget. The message and thought process were common – “your CPA is going up, your job count is going up, so it must be more competitive on our job board. The best and most effective strategy is increasing your budget to get back to the results your company saw in the first two months of the year.”
Before making any decision, the client reached out to the team at Haley Marketing and wanted to know what to do. They were unsure of just blindly increasing the budget.
Solution:
We were analyzing the data and saw something really interesting: the conversion rate for their ads was actually 16% better during the first week of March compared to February. (Conversion rate is the percentage of times a click turns into an application.)
Along with the conversion rate actually improving, the cost per click increased by 79% and the cost per application increased by 60%.
Combining a consistent (or improving) conversion rate with a higher cost per click (CPC) means this company was overpaying for candidates. The chart below shows the data.
| Dates | CPA | CPC | Conversion Rate | Daily Spend | Apps/Day |
| January | $3.68 | $0.45 | 12.3% | $183 | 50 |
| February | $3.63 | $0.34 | 9.3% | $207 | 57 |
| March 1-8 | $5.78 | $0.61 | 10.8% | $243 | 43 |
When your conversion rate stays the same (or improves) and your CPC increases, its time to actually DECREASE the spend per job by doing one of two things:
- Keep your daily budget the same and sponsor MORE jobs
- Reduce the daily budget and sponsor the same amount of jobs
We chose the second option and decreased the monthly budget, actually going against the strategy suggested by the job board representative.
During our conversation with the client, we explained what was happening. For some reason in March, your CPC increased. It could have been fewer candidates searching for jobs. It could have been fewer jobs posted on the job boards. It really doesn’t matter. Your CPA was going up. The team was noticing.
What matters is knowing how to adjust to these metrics as quickly as possible.
Results:
Our changes dropped the CPA by more than 50% and drove 33% more applications per day while we reduced their daily spend by 25%. Perfect!
| Dates | CPA | CPC | Conversion Rate | Daily Spend | Apps/Day |
| January | $3.68 | $0.45 | 12.3% | $183 | 50 |
| February | $3.63 | $0.34 | 9.3% | $207 | 57 |
| March 1-8 | $5.78 | $0.61 | 10.8% | $243 | 43 |
| March 9-20 | $3.35 | $0.39 | 11.5% | $181 | 54 |
| March 21-31 | $2.37 | $0.26 | 10.8% | $142 | 60 |
| March TOTAL | $3.44 | $0.38 | 11.1% | $183 | 53 |
This adjustment showcases a perfect reason to have someone you can trust with your job board spend. Candidate flow is vital to any business, especially staffing agencies who are constantly hiring and placing candidates into jobs.
Seeing a change in the market after one week and knowing what to do led to awesome results for the rest of March for this industrial staffing company.
If you need help in knowing how to manage and optimize your job spend, we’re here to help. Contact our team today to learn more and set up a free recruitment marketing consulting call!
