Earlier this year, Regent were approached by a charity who hadn’t had much luck with paid social, to the point where it was being disregarded as a viable option to drive donations, or even traffic.
Dec 9, 2024
Design & Development
Earlier this year, Regent were approached by a charity who hadn’t had much luck with paid social, to the point where it was being disregarded as a viable option to drive donations, or even traffic. Naturally, being a charity, that golden ROI metric is especially sensitive, given the fact that every £ in must generate significant return to be deemed fiscally responsible. With this in mind, we had a look at the facebook ads account and performed a detailed audit. There was a back and forth with the client to ensure we managed their expectations, as we didn’t have long to turn the campaign around, but after several discussions, we decided to give it a shot and move rapidly, as time was of the essence. We created the ads, working tirelessly to understand the customer persona and targeting preferences, and created a multi-funnel targeting mechanism that used demographic data, interest data and pixel data. Fast forward 3 weeks and a lot of hard work, and we delivered the client £310,000 in donations, spending under £22,000. Here’s how we did it, broken down into the key areas of: Data Creative Funnels AI
They say data is the new oil, and although this is a tired and trite saying, it’s beginning to ring more true every passing year. Before we even began, we looked into the conversion targeting strategy, to ensure we knew who we were targeting, and that results would be properly recorded. The charity had a strict rule on zero access to customer data, so uploading custom audiences to facebook ads manager was ruled out early on. Sad times, but that’s how the cookie crumbles sometimes.
Google Tag Manager + Tracking
The main concern was that conversion targeting wasn’t set up, meaning donor information wasn’t flowing through the pixel to train it on what a donation even was. Equipped with this knowledge, we set a top Regent developer that task of sorting out conversion targeting for the client. It was tricky, as they redirected to a third party payment provider, but using Google Tag Manager, we managed to crack it and ran several tests using facebook’s pixel helper to show the exact £ amount was being picked up by the pixel.
Google Tag Manager was then used to make custom triggers that told the pixel when someone dwelled for more than 3 minutes (deep browsing) and scrolled 75% down the page, which is a valuable metric for anyone reading a project page before donating.
Although there is much speculation around how effective AI is in running campaigns, we’ve found that a human-centric approach, using AI to purely augment the parts we can’t scale, works best. For example, we use AI marketing tools to analyse our campaigns, and adjust our bids intelligently if they get too high. We could technically have a person sitting there all day sifting through the data, but what’s the point? The AI works faster and spots trends we may miss, meaning we can react faster to the auction, and protect the ROAS for our client (return on ad spend) CBO (campaign budget optimisation) Although CBO wasn’t great when it came to the scene a few years ago, it has since stabilised amazingly well. Every campaign we ran was CBO enabled, meaning the ad-sets didn’t need specific budgets – the winner took the lions share by default, and we just focused on scaling the ad-spend profitably. We began at a sensible £50/day, and by the end, had scaled up to nearly £1000/day, based upon the best performing ad-sets, which revealed themselves to us over the course of 2 weeks. In our books, CBO is a huge advantage and works amazingly well. However, the only caveat to this is to ensure your ad-sets are balanced. This doesn’t work if 1 ad-set has 10 million people in it, and another has 10,000. The larger ad-set needs more spend to sift through the data, meaning the attention/value ratio will be skewed. Keep your ad-sets around the same size (give or take 15-20%) for the best results.