Search Campaign Overrun with job applications

[jasonscherer]

We have a home services client who had two search campaigns running. They both had been performing well for over 14 months. Each campaign has a dedicated landing page.
About 4 months ago, “Campaign A” started getting an influx of people “applying for jobs” through the contact form on the landing page. It got to the point where 75% of the leads were job seekers.

We negative keyword anything that had to do with jobs, employment etc. We also ensured our target language was set to English because most job seekers were using Spanish.

We turned “Campaign A” off at the start of November 2023 and left Campaign B running since it had never had a job seeker. In fact, it would bring in 30-50 solid leads per month.

In January 2024 “Campaign B” got hammered with job seekers. Of 42 conversions, 29 were people looking for a job.

We have been running the campaigns to “maximize conversions.” Also, we negative keyword the brand just to be on the safe side. I have never seen anything like this before.

We have other clients in the same vertical but different cities and have never had this problem before. Has anyone had this happen before, and was there a way to solve it?

Side note:
The categories do not qualify for LSA and most of the time LSAs do not show in the results.

 

[Chris Barnard]

I've seen it intermittently in LSAs, not so much in PPC since you can usually limit that with negs like you said. Assuming you also have a bunch of related negtive kws in place? Are they coming from a specific location you can maybe bid down or exlude? Could you block IPs if they are coming from similar or same? What kws are most coming from? Did they (the advertiser) promote that they're hiring in other ways?

 

[jasonscherer]

I've seen it intermittently in LSAs, not so much in PPC since you can usually limit that with negs like you said. Assuming you also have a bunch of related negtive kws in place? Are they coming from a specific location you can maybe bid down or exlude? Could you block IPs if they are coming from similar or same? What kws are most coming from? Did they (the advertiser) promote that they're hiring in other ways?

THANK YOU, Chris! Next time you are in Denver, the first five rounds are on me.

Your comment about the IP address sent me down a rabbit hole. I had multiple submissions coming from the same IP range. The a,b and c block all matched. MY server log showed the referring URL as:

https://www.adsensecustomsearchads.com/,https://www.tiktok.com

That is one URL.

Long story short, it looks like we are a victim of TikTok/ Adsense arbitrage. From what I have been reading, opting out of the search partners network is the only way to prevent this.

While I’m not 100% certain of this, I’m about 97.99% certain. We are turning off the search partners network and monitoring it for the next few weeks.

 

[Chris Barnard]

That offer is accepted & locked in my memory, Jason! I got the next 5

Interesting, sucks but at least you're hot on the trail. Sounds like a blog post too. Search Partners typically produces very little converting traffic, if any. In my experience at least.