This page is for UK recruitment agencies, from specialist boutiques to multi-branch temp and permanent agencies, that want Google Ads to bring in two things: new hiring clients and the candidates to fill their roles. Those two goals behave so differently in an ad account that most of what follows is about keeping them apart, measuring each properly and spending on the one that limits your growth.
How employers and candidates search in the UK
The client side is small and valuable. A hiring manager or HR lead types something like “accountancy recruitment agency Birmingham”, “temp warehouse staff Leeds” or “IT contractor agency London”. There are not many of these searches, but each one can be worth a long-running account or a stream of placements. The searcher is usually comparing three or four agencies, so the ad and the page behind it have to show at a glance that you cover their sector and their area.
The candidate side is the opposite: lots of searches, most of them cheap and broad. People type a job title with “jobs” or “near me”, a town, a pay rate or a shift pattern. Much of that demand is already met by the big job boards and by the job listings box Google shows above the normal results, which is fed by vacancy data on agency and employer sites rather than by ads. Paid search for candidates earns its place on hard-to-fill roles, niche skills and urgent temp bookings, not on every vacancy you hold.
What changes in Google Ads for a recruitment agency
Two goals, kept in separate campaigns
Client acquisition and candidate attraction need separate campaigns, separate budgets and separate conversion actions. If both report a “lead” into the same column, the account will drift towards whichever is cheaper, which is almost always candidates. I set up search campaigns that produce enquiries for the client side, and treat candidate campaigns as a top-up for specific roles with their own spend cap.
Keywords and negatives
The word “recruitment” cuts both ways. “Recruitment agency” is searched by employers looking for help and by people looking for work, and also by people who want a job as a recruiter. Client campaigns need a negative keyword list covering jobs, vacancies, salary, CV, apply and “recruitment consultant jobs” from day one. Candidate campaigns need the reverse: terms such as “agency fees”, “hire staff” and “recruitment software” kept out.
Advertising rules that apply to job ads
Job adverts in the UK sit under the Equality Act 2010, so wording such as “young and energetic team” or “recent graduates only” can be discriminatory, and so can narrowing who sees the ad. I do not restrict candidate ads by age or gender, even where the platform settings would allow it. Agencies also have duties under the Conduct of Employment Agencies and Employment Businesses Regulations 2003 about what their adverts state, and Google’s own misrepresentation rules catch vague earnings promises. I am not a lawyer, so I write ad copy for your compliance lead to approve rather than relying on my reading of the rules.
Landing pages
Employers should land on a page about the sector and region they hire in, with the roles you place, how you work and a short call-back form. Candidates should land on the live vacancy, or a page of current roles in that field, where applying takes a minute on a phone. Forcing a candidate to create an account before uploading a CV loses most of the people you paid for. Where your site cannot offer either page, I can scope a landing page built for the campaign.
Tracking past the form
A client enquiry is only a lead; a signed terms agreement or a filled role is the result. I record the Google click ID with each enquiry so that, once your CRM or applicant tracking system marks a lead as a new client or a placement, it can be sent back to Google as one of your offline conversions. That lets bidding learn from placements rather than form fills. Measurement also has to respect cookie consent under UK GDPR and PECR, which means setting up consent mode before launch rather than after.
How I usually structure a recruitment account
| Campaign | What it does | Judged on |
|---|---|---|
| Brand | Covers searches for your agency’s name, which are cheap and protect you from competitors bidding on it | Calls and enquiries |
| Client acquisition | One ad group per specialism and area, using the terms employers use to describe the staff they need | Qualified client enquiries, then new clients |
| Candidate attraction | Only for roles you struggle to fill, grouped by job family and location | Completed applications, then shortlisted candidates |
| Remarketing | Reaches past site visitors, kept small and mostly aimed at employers | Return enquiries |
I would leave Performance Max out until offline conversions are flowing. Without them, it tends to find cheap candidate form fills and report them as success, whatever you set as the goal.
How I run the work
- Agree the bottleneck. If your consultants have more vacancies than candidates, budget goes one way; if they have candidates but too few clients, it goes the other.
- Audit or build. I review any existing account, the search terms it has paid for and how enquiries are recorded, then rebuild around the two goals.
- Connect the CRM. We decide which stages count (new client, shortlist, placement) and how they get back to Google.
- Launch small. I start with brand and the two or three specialisms that make you the most per placement.
- Review monthly. You get a plain report on cost per qualified enquiry and per placement, what I changed and what I plan next.
Mistakes I see in recruitment accounts
- One campaign targeting “recruitment agency” across the UK, mostly paying for job seekers’ clicks.
- Counting CV uploads and client enquiries as the same conversion, so the bidding chases the cheaper of the two.
- Advertising every vacancy, including easy ones the job boards already fill for free.
- Ads for roles that have already been filled, which wastes clicks and annoys candidates.
- Location targeting set to people “interested in” an area, so a temp booking in Bristol attracts clicks from the other end of the country.
- No tracking of phone calls, when many employers pick up the phone rather than fill in a form.
Where Google Ads fits with job boards, SEO and social ads
Google Ads works best on the client side, where intent is high and volume is low. Candidates are often easier to reach where they already spend time, so Facebook and Instagram ads for recruitment usually do more for volume hiring than search ads. For organic candidate traffic, marking up your vacancies so they appear as a job posting result in Google costs nothing per click and is worth sorting before you pay for candidate searches.
Next step
Tell me which side of the business is short, clients or candidates, and which sectors and areas you cover. I will look at your current account or your site and tell you whether paid search is the right tool and where I would start. Book a free consultation and we can go through it on a call.