Multimedia Ads prove a top-performing candidate for Imkey

Making resumés stand out online

When you’re looking for a new job, making the right visual impression matters. Candidates spend plenty of time thinking about how to dress, how to style themselves—and what signals their choices send. When your business helps people land their next role through crafting more impactful resumés and cover letters, then first impressions matter, too. They certainly do for Imkey, the Netherlands-based online resumé builder that’s showing jobseekers exactly what it can do for them through Multimedia Ads from Microsoft Advertising.

Visualizing a path to faster customer acquisition

Imkey offers customers a choice of hundreds of tailored templates that are adapted to different roles. Its worldwide website, resume.io is available in 16 localized versions, and millions of jobseekers have used it to generate resumés and cover letters. With a wider range of career-guiding services being prepared for launch, the priority for Heini and Imkey’s Senior Search Engine Advertising Specialist, Michael Wohlfeld, is to build brand awareness while generating as many leads as possible among professionals wanting to make an impact with future employers. The team knew at once that Multimedia Ads could provide the perfect fit.

“I’ve always been a fan of display ads when it comes to building brand awareness—and there’s real value today in being able to integrate search and display campaigns together,” explains Michael. “I was aware that display campaigns can’t always match search for performance—but I wanted to see what impact Multimedia Ads could have for us.”

Building awareness without compromising performance

What Michael hadn’t expected was an almost instant uplift in search performance once Imkey introduced its localized images of example resumés into search results pages. “We saw results within a couple of weeks—and it was a big surprise,” he recalls. “There were a lot of conversions, a lot of interactions, and the costs were not very high. We saw there was real potential and so we made the decision to expand our use of Multimedia Ads. We now have around 46 campaigns running across big markets for us like India and Brazil—and we’re really happy with the performance we’re getting.”

That performance benefits from human beings’ preference for visual decision-making—and their greater engagement with an idea that they can see. As Heini explains, adding visuals to search campaigns through Multimedia Ads doesn’t just deliver greater standout and drive awareness—it directly influences the decisions to click and convert.

“When you’re just using text ads, you can try to find the right words that really match the search intent—but competitors do that as well,” he says. “When you add visuals, you can really differentiate yourself. It’s more appealing, it gives so much more information than text alone, and it engages on an emotional level.”