Campaigns: FAQs

What is a Campaign?
A campaign is typically a "grouping of jobs" whereby you can use your own jobs criteria to create a long-running campaign that you will optimize based on performance data. Job-based campaigns can be created based on job category, job location, job-title-keyword, or any mix of criteria. For example, you can do a campaign named "California Accounting Jobs" by choosing the job category of Accounting, and also the state as California from the state drop-down. That will pull in all of the accounting jobs that are currently located in California. Also, that will instantly pull in any new jobs that fit that criteria as soon as they're posted, so that you don't have to come back and do manual work every time new jobs are posted as the system will automatically do this. Job-based campaigns are totally independent of media channel type also, as you can run the campaign by selecting your media channel budget percents at the "Master Budgets" tab. For example, by running an "Information Technology" campaign on JobAds, Banner Ads, Video Ads, Search Ads, and Social Ads. Campaigns are always defined universally, across all media types, because this then allows you to analyze the results in one universal analytics framework.

Can I create a Campaign even without specific Jobs?
Yes, for a "non-jobs" campaign, you can expand the "Advanced Options" area of the campaign-create-box, and update your Campaign Type to a "Non-Jobs" campaign type. Then you can use a percentage of your overall flexible budget by entering a specific percentage to the campaign - or, you can create a "fixed budget" campaign by entering a specific dollar value for the campaign. Most campaigns are job-based campaigns, because you're looking to drive results in the form of applications and hires to specific jobs and specific job types. However, you might need to run a "National Diversity" campaign or a "Military & Veteran Targeting" campaign, or a "Search Ads Branded Terms" campaign or "Banner Ads Retargeting" campaign - in all of these cases, specific jobs are not relevant, so you would need to use this advanced options area to create an appropriate "non-job-based" campaign.

What is a "Weight" and how does it work?
When creating a flexible jobs-based campaign you can use a weight to declare relative importance of each job at the job level. Depending on your operating needs you can use any scale and it works the same way. You can use an Index-type value where "1" is the average importance or a simple 1-10 scale where 10 is the most important job and 1 is the least, or 1-20, or 1-100. A "0" would mean those jobs are not getting any spending though you can also achieve that by not including such job in your active campaigns.

What weight does, is allow your campaigns to be set up just once, so that they self-optimize from that point onward based on what you are trying to accomplish, but with no manual adjustments from you beyond that initial setup. You can look at your budget-per-job in the campaigns list ($/job), and your flexible-weighted campaigns will always be ranked from most-to-least important, and you can also see that the budget per job is always ordered from high to low, automatically, no matter how much your job counts fluctuate over time in each campaign.

This means that your campaign budgets are always self-adjusting based on the number of jobs in a campaign. If you have a campaign that suddenly has 0 jobs, the spending will automatically stop without you needing to take action. If you have a "High Priority" or "Hot Jobs" type of campaign with 10 jobs in it and then you need to put 40 additional jobs into it, that again means you don't have to do any extra math or manual budget adjusting. The system will automatically adjust budgets across each campaign, and across each channel type and site, within each campaign. Campaigns adjust themselves automatically with zero effort on your behalf, every day of the week - each time, saving you what would otherwise be 8 hours or more of manual math adjustments with each individual media vendor.

Do I have to use a Weight? Can I use a specific budget dollar value instead?
Flexible weight-based campaigns are highly recommended in almost all cases. However for the totally unavoidable use case, such as a division putting in exactly $2,500 that they want to see spent on only their jobs - this is possible. To create a "Fixed Budget" campaign, select your job criteria and expand the "Advanced Options", and update the drop-down from the "Flexible" default to "Fixed Budget" instead.

Can I flight a fixed budget campaign over very specific start and end dates?
Yes, in the advanced options drop-down, after selecting Fixed Budget, choose "Campaign Flights" and enter a specific start date and end date and a specific budget amount. This will schedule your campaign to start and end on the dates you specify. A good use case for this is an event-based campaign, let's say if there's a hiring event 2 weeks from Friday, and you want the campaign to start in 2 days, and end the day prior to the event: you can use this feature to schedule the campaign to start and end accordingly.

Can I add additional flights to a "Fixed-Flighted" campaign?
Yes, you can edit the fixed-flighted campaign by clicking on the Edit Pencil for the campaign in question. There you can simply add additional flights by choosing the additional flight start and end dates and by adding the budgets for the additional flights. Let's say you want to run a campaign that always runs for the first week of each month, on the first Monday-Wednesday of each month, always for $500. That could be a lot to do and a lot to remember if you were forced to do it real time every month throughout the year - but this feature allows you to schedule that all out just once time at the beginning of the year, so that you're all "set" and hitting your goals all year long.

Can I edit the campaign names?
Yes, you can edit any campaign name. Also, as you are creating the campaign a suggested campaign will begin auto-populating, but you can edit that name prior to creating the campaign. We highly recommend short and familiar names that you are comfortable with long-term, as the real value from any campaign comes from accumulating a lot of data about what is working for you for those specific jobs, so if you have a simple and stable campaign structure you can maximize the analytics value long term.

Can I do everything right on this one page?
In some cases, yes. If you launch specific campaign types such as "Banner Ads Retargeting" or "Search Ads Branded Terms" from the Advanced Options drop-down, launching that effort is as fast as selecting that drop-down (3 seconds). However, even then you should note that those campaigns will launch from the Banner Ads and Search Ads Channel tabs by utilizing your default creative.

So if you have creative for those efforts other than your enterprise-defaults, you should be sure to then update that for those specific campaigns, at the relevant channel tabs ("C" from the short menu). For standard job-based campaigns, you can instantly launch across all your channels if you have your channel percent defaults pre-set up on your Master Budgets page. If you don't have those defaults set up, or, if you need to use a channel mix other than the default media channels mix, you will need to edit that at the Master Budgets area as a 2nd step. Additionally, please keep in mind that the creative units can be seen and set up at each channel tab, both for the defaults and for the campaign-specific creative controls for Banner Ads, Video Ads, Search Ads, Social Ads, etc.

How can I view my Jobs here?
Viewing jobs is just a matter of using the filters, which are the same filters on your Campaign-create tab, only with the additional filter here of "Campaign." On the main campaigns page you can click on your jobs count for a super quick preview of the jobs in the campaign, but for more in-depth job analysis, this tab is useful for looking at your jobs by category, location, or campaign. Also, you an export your jobs by using the export icon at the top left corner of the below jobs-list table.

Can I export my jobs for analysis offline in excel?
Yes, just click the export icon at the top left corner of the jobs-list table, just below the search filters.

For a campaign, can I see what jobs are being sponsored currently (today) and why?
The "%sponsored" feature on the campaigns tab, sets is so that the system is automatically sponsoring the bottom X% of jobs - specifically the jobs with the fewest "Applies Per Day" as this means that they are pacing slower than their peers in the same campaign. The currently sponsored jobs show with a green circle, and the currently unsponsored jobs show with a red circle. You can also see the post date of the job, the overall applies, and the Applies Per Day.

Is this a job-level performance report?
No, this jobs area is not a performance report at all, it's an area to see and understand your current jobs, but not your media performance. All of your performance reporting can be found in the R for reports tab.

What is the Edit Pencil icon for to the right of each job-row in the jobs list?
This is a nonfunctional currently in-development option. What we're building here in this pop-over, is the ability for you to control job-by-job, where each job is posted in terms of "ad hoc" job posting sites. This may be for one-off types of efforts where you don't have a large contract but you just want to post one job to one job board, such as Careerbuilder, Monster, Craigslist, or niche boards like Nurse.com, associated job boards, college job boards, diversity job boards, and so on. This also will be useful for worldwide job postings on sites like Naukri, Stepstone, TotalJobs, Reed, Seek, and so on. 

What is Job Duping?
You can think of job duping as a simple "IF / THEN" sort of logical statement - that you can manage here in terms of what jobs you want duplicated (IF) and what they should be duplicated out to (THEN). You'll notice the top filters look the same as the filters on your Campaigns Tab and on your Jobs Tab, because here also, the filters in question are being powered by your own intrinsic jobs data. Let's say you want to dupe all "Call Center" job titles to also be "Customer Service Representative" to gain the benefit of job-seeker search traffic on that alternate job title naming approach. You select your "IF" criteria first which in that case would be "Call Center" in the Job Title field, then you select your "THEN" criteria to be Job Title: "Customer Service Representative."

Can I also duplicate out by locations?
Yes, you can duplicate out by locations in the same way keeping the title the same, or by adding job title duplication simultaneously with location duplication. Choose your "IF" jobs criteria for duplication, then choose your "THEN" by entering a job location, just be sure that you have the city and state names correct and in the correct format as specified.

What's the point of job duplication, should I use this feature?
This is an optional feature but it can come in handy. If, for example, your budget per job is too high for the naturally occurring job seeker search volume, additional titles will greatly help expand your job seeker reach, drawing in more clicks and more applies, and at a lower cost per apply. This is because job ads are basically a supply and demand marketplace, and by increasing the jobs supply with more sponsored job titles, your click bids, cost-per-click values, and cost-per-apply values in Media Cloud, would then automatically come down. This feature is powerful for "work from home" jobs as you can then post the job in whatever markets are working best for you, without wasting clicks and dollars in markets that are not efficient for filling your openings. "Travel Nurses" is another great use case, where you can draw from a very large and targeted geographic pool, keeping just 1 req open in your ATS for convenience, but still getting the benefit from multiple job postings in multiple locations.

Do my duped jobs show up in organic job search results?
No, the Indeed.com policy is that job duplication must be limited to paid sponsored jobs - the search quality team at Indeed, requires that each job be unique and unduplicated when it comes to organic job listings. Therefore our integration with Indeed does allow for our duplicated jobs to run in sponsored jobs inventory, but only the original job reqs will show up in organic job search results. Most other job sites are paid-only and job duplication of this nature is allowed.

How do duped jobs look in my job-level reporting?
Job-level data is conveniently aggregated into real original "parent" jobs. We call ATS jobs the parent jobs, and duplicated jobs, the child jobs, and we track this via a simple job numbering system that uses your own ATS job number for each job. Job numbers might be 1234, 1234-a, 1234-b, 1234-c, 1234-d, and that tells you that they are all for job 1234. You can see all of these dupes if you click on the job links from your Manage-Campaigns page, or by viewing all jobs including job dupes in the Manage-Jobs page, where you can also export your jobs to excel for offline analysis as well.

Why can't I see my duplicated jobs / when can I see my duplicated jobs?
When you create a job duping rule, the jobs aren't automatically and instantly live. This allows you to edit and adjust as you need without fear of things going not-as-you-planned in the short term. The job duplication engine is automatic, but it does run only a few times per day, so you won't instantly see live job dupes in your active campaigns based on your job duplication rules.

Where can I see my completed job-dupes the day after creating my job-duping rules logic?
You can click for a preview in any campaign on the Campaigns page, to see your jobs and job dupes. Job dupes have a job number identical to a real job number, only with a letter extension added like -a, -b, -c, etc.

Do I have to do anything special to insure my job dupes are sponsored the way I want?
Not necessarily, job dupes are exactly the same as "normal" jobs in our system after you've create them. For example if you dupe a job title that is in the Accounting job category, the dupe will also maintain all the exact same criteria, and so it will also be in the Accounting job category - therefore if you have a campaign with criteria Category=Accounting, then that duped job will automatically appear in that campaign. However if you created a campaign based on exact match req numbers, such as the job req must be exactly 1234, then your dupes like 1234-a and 1234-b, will NOT go into that campaign, unless you manually add those dupe req numbers or switch over to a more future-proof sort of criteria like using job categories and job titles as criteria instead - which is recommended as the best practice wherever possible.

What's the difference between my budget here, and my Orders on the ordering tab?
Orders are an upper limit cap on what you can budget for, a safety measure to insure you're not unintentionally overspending your budget, or, spending it too quickly for that matter. If the total of your available Orders is $20,000, you can budget this month to spend $10K, $18K, $20K --- but you can't spend $22,000, as you would be $2,000 short and would therefore be prevented from budgeting for that amount (until you go into the Orders tab to add another $2K order if that is your true intent.)

Can I schedule my budget out for the year?
Yes, you can schedule out as much as you'd like by hitting "Edit Budget Schedule" at the top of the page. Budgets are always monthly, but you can have the same value scheduled for each month - or, you can vary your budgets any way you'd like. (For example, $10K this month, $20K next month, $15K the month after, etc, if you have seasonality to factor.)

What can I do at this Master Budgets tab other than set my overall flexible budget for the month and for the coming months?
Here is the place where you choose your media channels to activate in each campaign by utilizing percentages. You can have a default setting that is used for all or most campaigns, or, you can vary your channel percents by campaign. For example, maybe your "Accounting" campaign would be 80% jobads and 20% banner ads, whereas your "Software Engineers" campaign is 30% jobads, 20% search ads, 40% banner ads and 10% social ads. Importantly, this is the place to see and manage what media channels you wish to be live on, for any given campaign at any given point in time.

Since the system automatically optimizes the site percentages within each individual channel, can't your algorithm also auto-optimize the media channel percentages for each campaign?
No, not yet at least. Site optimization within a channel is pretty straight forward: Indeed, Glassdoor, Ziprecruiter, Monster, and so on are all doing the same exact thing - driving actively-job-searching candidates to specific jobs where they they can read about the specific job and complete a specific job application - so automatic site optimization makes perfect sense there. "Media Channel" percents are a bit different because it's much more about your underlying strategy. We already know the results differ between media channel types. Banner Ads are strong candidate "Influencers" as they are often times served to candidates at the top of your recruitment marketing funnel. Whereas, Job Ads are "Drivers" which are designed to be direct-response-clicks, just prior to a completed application for fully active candidates at the bottom of your recruitment marketing funnel. You may wish to have a strong and diverse advertising media mix for this reason, and in fact, this approach is almost always the right strategic decision longer term. Therefore, right now, there's no back-end intelligent algorithm that will optimize this for you - but here you can set your percents-by-channel to anything you'd like so long as they always mathematically add up to 100% when running on more than one media channel.

What is the Ordering Tab?
The ordering tab is our direct integration of business processes related to media buying, for the sake of full system transparency. It is achieved by API integration with Salesforce and Netsuite, the technologies Symphony Talent uses to track new orders, and invoice our clients appropriately for said orders.

Why is this Ordering Tab built in?
This feature provides our clients and full-service Symphony teams with shared and universal transparency. We don't want you to have to track down emails or to call someone to ask a basic question like how much you were billed last month for media - these things are simple and fast to look up, directly from Media Cloud. Even more critically, the Ordering tab provides us with what we informally call our "gas tank limit." This limit keeps you from inadvertently budgeting and spending more media dollars than you actually have available. If the total of your current orders (and all prior unspent roll-over) totals to $20K, this means you can't budget to spend $22K, the system safety kicks in --- and if you do actually intend to spend more, it's then the simple matter of adding that $2K order to the ordering tab, which then increases your budget spending limit accordingly in your Master Budgets.

How are Orders Different From Budgets?
The sum of your orders creates a maximum limit of what you can budget to spend. This is a safety for the system, so you don't accidentally spend more money you have on these open media marketplaces. We sometimes refer to the sum of Orders like it's a "gas tank limit" so in that analogy, placing your orders is like buying your gas, and budgeting is your daily spending activity that's then like driving your car and using up your gas.

What are PPC/CPA job ads?
PPC means Pay Per Click, CPA means Cost Per Application. The job ads space is largely "performance-based" these days rather than "job posting duration cost" based. The ad marketplace is coming to resemble online advertising overall, like Google and Facebook, which now dominate worldwide advertising online and are both 100% performance based. The largest example of PPC based job ads in recruitment is Indeed.com, the market leader. However, lots of other site players are taking click and apply "bids" in the competitive marketplace buying model, which results in supply and demand dynamics that driving efficient pricing and performance for all involved. Other job sites in this space are: Glassdoor, Ziprecruiter, Talroo, Snagajob, Nexxt, Monster, Upward, Linkup, Neuvoo, Jobcase, and Startwire to name a few. "Media Private Exchange" is the Media Cloud ad exchange, where we take 90% of your average CPA for any campaign, and put that out as a CPA bid across the rest of the marketplace, which guarantees strong and ever-improving performance, automatically. For smaller campaigns running Indeed & Media Private Exchange 50/50 is a best practice for performance maximization.

What is the "Edit Site Defaults" for?
The site defaults is what allows you to launch campaigns instantly from your Campaigns Page, without even having to visit this channel tab in order to get any new campaign live. If, for example, you have your default five sites set, any new campaign that launches will take those five defaults automatically. You can edit the site break-out campaign-by-campaign if required also.

Can I edit my site breakdown for this channel campaign-by-campaign?
Yes, you can edit your sites in any individual campaign. To edit all your campaigns at the same time in bulk, this is fast and easy in one place by using your defaults and then "updating existing" campaigns with your new defaults.

What is the best practice in terms of sites if I'm not sure?
50% Indeed, and 50% Appcast Exchange. Site optimization will take over that balance from there as performance data comes in each week. Appcast Exchange has a CPA that is guaranteed to perform as it's set to be 90% of the average CPA for the campaign in question. If Indeed is driving a $10 CPA for a campaign, Appcast will drive them at $9 per, if Indeed is driving a $20 CPA for a campaign, Appcast will drive the applies at $18 each. Site optimization will take the percents to the optimal level based on delivery. If for example Appcast is only able to deliver on 40% of the budget, the budget percentages will then eventually reflect 60% Indeed and 40% Appcast, without you ever having to do anything manually.

After I enter my site budget percents, over time I notice the site breakdowns change - why is that?
We're running a site optimization algorithm for each campaign. What matters is the performance for each particular campaign, not overall. So some sites might work for hourly and admin, and maybe others work better for software engineering, so firstly, the data that powers the algorithm is always the campaign-relevant data set only. What factors into the slow week-by-week algorithmic changes in spending by site are the following: CPA (lower is better), Quality (based on expected Apply-to-Hire ratio, and how that expectation varies by site based on ST benchmarks by job type), and media delivery (fully spending what we're trying to spend). The last one isn't obvious but it's important: maybe one site is working the best, but can't spend any more due to the naturally limited quantity of job-seekers they can access. If something is driving the lowest CPA and we're trying to spend 30% of the weekly budget on it each week, but each week we only spend 20% of the budget --- we're not going to let our algorithm increase the budget from 30% to 33% just because it's working very efficiency. If it's not delivering fully on 30% of the spend, increasing the spend percent to 33% would be counter-productive, so spend delivery and audience size are just as important as efficiency and quality.

What if I don't understand all this or know what to do?
The Symphony Talent professional digital media and strategy teams are here to help and also to optimize your buys for you. We're giving you access to the full platform because we believe in performance and transparency, but also, we are the experts, and we're here and ready to give you our best recommendations. What you should expect to bring to the table, are the things we can't decide for you: what is your budget, and what are your goals?

What is "Auto Site Budgets% On" in the top right corner?
This is a quick toggle option. For example, if you have 10 sites in a campaign and you want to drop a new site in with 5% of the campaign budget, you can just quickly do it, and the rest of the site budgets will self-adjust without you needing to do manual math on everything to make room for your new site. However, perhaps you want full control, to run 10 sites, and put exactly 10% toward each site --- in that case you'll want to toggle this setting off, to set all your budgets manually till they equal 100% then hit save. The system won't let you save in this mode unless all of your percentages add up to exactly 100%.

How can I control the exact percentage I'm putting to each site, it seems like it keeps changing on me?
Note the top right toggle "Auto Site Budget% On." When this is toggled on, the other sites will automatically adapt to any edit, to insure that the percents total to 100%. If you want full edit control, toggle this off, and then you can edit one by one to control the exact budget percent to each site you wish to run - the system won't let you save this edit until your manual percents total to exactly 100%.
How do I enter the details of my prepaid slots packages and prepaid unlimited jobs packages?
First, expand down the top area that says "Show Slots & Unlimited Package Buy Details." Then you can choose your site, for example if you choose "Linkedin - Slots" you'll be prompted to enter a price per slot and a number of slots, as well as a Start Date and an End Date. Once you enter and save those details you then just need to assign your slots to your below campaigns - if you have 100 slots, you'll want to assign 100 to your below campaigns to insure full utilization. Once you're set up, that's it, the system will always be slotting in your newest and best jobs in each campaign that you specify. To launch an unlimited-postings package buy just put in the overall price, start date and end date, and all your jobs will be auto-tagged/tracked, and distributed to the job site in question for placement.

What jobs get slotted in, if for example I have a 20 job campaign, and I assign 10 job slots to that campaign?
The 10 newest jobs will be slotted in, automatically at any given time. This means that when a new job gets posted, that gets slotted to job board in question, and the oldest of the 10 currently slotted-jobs drops out. Based on our tracking-to-hire data this is the best approach for a multitude of reasons: Reason number 1, is that newly posted jobs naturally get the most attention from candidates. Another critical reason, is that when we look at our tracking-to-hire data, the applicants that get hired are much more likely to be the early-applicants for any job - the applicants that apply very early in the life of a job, within a couple of days of the initial posting date. This is likely related to the fact that early applicants are considered by hiring managers for the longest amount of time, and especially very early on, when they are choosing which applicants to interview. As the job ages, hiring managers may already be deciding between 3 final-round applicants, and so new applications collected toward the end of a job's natural lifespan could be highly qualified candidates, but ultimately ignored and not truly considered for the opening - which wastes talent acquisition dollars while disappointing those late applicants that never really had a fighting chance of being hired.

How can I tell when my slots are being fully utilized?
At the top in the "package buy details" area, you can see the utilized percentage for any slot buy - to edit the slot allotments by campaign, you'll need do do so below, within each individual campaign.

Is this feature an automatic set-it-and-forget-it type of feature?
Yes, this is a "smart" feature meaning that it can constantly make changes on your behalf, always slotting in the right jobs over time and without any of your own manual effort to do so. The ideal use for this feature is, setting it up once, right at the start of the year, and then sitting back to enjoy automatic full-utilization, with the exact right jobs always being slotted in, every day of the week from that point onward.

Why do "unlimited" packages show up in each campaign?
For unlimited buys, we're always sending every job, but we're also tagging it for you automatically, campaign-by-campaign. This is important for later on when you look at your data and what really worked for all the things you truly care about (as expressed by your campaign structure.) Ultimately, who cares if a package buy has a "low CPA" if you have no idea what jobs people are applying to and if those jobs actually matter to you or not in terms of your talent acquisition goals. What this feature automatically does, is pull in the relevant data, campaign by campaign so you can see how that unlimited package did for your call center jobs, your sales jobs, your IT jobs, whatever campaign view you're looking to analyze in your reporting.