CareerOne and the cookie monster
Posted By: Thomas Shaw, 7:30am Friday 25 March 2011
CareerOne has finally launched a local version of the Monster Career Ad Network (CAN) called CareerOne Ad Network. This would have to be one of the products I am most excited about. I remember being blown away by the technology during a Monster CAN product demo in 2008.
For those of you who don't understand, there is this patented tracking cookie that saves itself to your web browsing history while visiting partner sites.
An easier way of explaining CAN is to think of it as a targeted Google AdWords campaign. You may have seen a number of job ads that look like PPC ads across News Digital Media, Adconion and Post Click network sites. Each time you visit one of these sites, it will display targeted jobs matching your recent search behaviour (ie. by accessing the browsers cookie).
There has been much discussion of late on behavioral targeting. Proposed legislation in the USA has made a number of web browsers introduce "do not track" standards. It is too early to predict how this will affect the product going forward and I will try and cover this at a later stage.
The next phase being developed by Monster is what they describe as post-impression response tracking. This is a set of enhanced analytics that can tell you where a candidate saw your CAN ad, how they came to your career site, and what they did when they got there.
On the outset it looks very promising, but I am in two minds on actual implementation with existing recruitment websites and application tracking systems.
Post-impression action occurs when a user is served an ad but does not click on it; then, at a later time, visits a career site and completes an expression of interest, such as a job apply. In post-impression tracking, the impression can be credited for influencing that action even if it occurred at a later date.
The theory behind indirect response is that the seeker will remember a well-designed recruitment ad and may visit an employer’s career site at a later time. These indirect responses can represent a large portion of the ‘total response’ to a recruitment media impression. Measuring direct click-based response alone really only provides employers with the tip of the iceberg in recruitment effectiveness measurement.