I guess my error was reflective of the consumer experience – so many products from which to choose! (and so many ways for Seek to grow their yield:))

I’m afraid you’re misquoting me there on the employers vs. recruiters thing.

I suspect you’re mixing up comments I made last year about a different product of ours – StandOut Ads – where I said that in testing, jobseekers responded more to corporate logos than they did to recruitment agency logos .

This is not going to be a surprise to anyone really – when looking for a job, information about the employer is much more valuable than information about the recruitment process.

Premium Ads are a product for all our advertisers. The new Self Service capability we’ve introduced just takes them to a much broader audience at a much more useful point of advertiser need.

Usually job board advertising products are aimed towards recruitment decision makers who make buying decisions.

Premium Ads Self Service is aimed as a product designed quite specifically for use by recruitment consultants, HR professionals, small business owners and any other recruitment advertiser as they go about their actual day to day jobs.

The service enables Recruitment consultants and HR professionals to see what options are available to them right at the moment when they need to fill an actual vacancy.

Putting ‘casual’ advertising aside for a moment, job boards currently sell their products at a recruitment-planning level where advertisers forecast their recruitment advertising needs across the length of a pack or subscription contract.

The service also responds to the many advertisers who have asked for visibility of what options are available to them on SEEK, since many Premium Ad slots are sold out months in advance.

You’ve also overlooked a subtle but important change in Premium Ads distribution. Previously, an advertiser’s Premium Ad would only be shown on specific searches eg Sydney – Accounting – Tax.

We’ve changed the distribution so that where a jobseeker searches on a broader search – eg Sydney Accounting – the Premium Ads targeted at the lower level are rotated on a share of voice basis in the broader search. This massively increases the visibility of the ad to a broader audience, delivering yet more value to the advertiser, at no extra cost.

Finally, the stats really do point to these ads being good value for money. They’re only $40 more than a classic SEEK ad, and if you were to factor in the cost of refreshing an ad once, I think you’ll find that the economics of these ads really do stack up very well indeed when you consider that the average performance uplift is around the 300% mark.