Your Step-by-Step Meta Ads Blueprint with NextAfter Senior Media Buyer Eddie Laing

00:00:04
            

Well, hey there, Eddie. Welcome in. Thanks for joining me on kind of a special episode. We're gonna be doing these a few times a month for the Holy Donuts podcast, where we do a deep dive into all things nonprofit, donor acquisition retention strategy, campaign strategy, digital ads. I mean, just really, it's a time for us to nerd out on all things nonprofit marketing.        

00:00:24
            

So, man, I appreciate you taking the time to join me today. Yeah, thanks for having me. So, really quick, why don't you give a quick bio for people who don't know you, tell us a little bit more about you and kind of how you got into nonprofit donor acquisition. Donor development work. Yeah, so I kind of stumbled into it.        

00:00:44
            

Going to college, worked for a small nonprofit, and then just through that, really enjoyed seeing how we could efficiently fundraise and do more for the nonprofit. Going from that smaller nonprofit with a team of five, moved up to helping churches for a good bit, where we served over 600 churches utilizing the Google Ad grant. And then from there took a turn and went more. So performance based marketing. We were doing direct fundraising and split testing, conversion rate optimization for the past four years.        

00:01:22
            

And so I was a senior media buyer and mainly on the Google side, but also meta and direct deals where when I had left there, we had our, a couple clients hit million dollar months in just the channel of Google when they started out at like $12,000 a month. Yeah, that's awesome, man. So you are kind of expert in all things digital fundraising, which is what I always love talking with you about. So today we're going to go pretty specific for this episode where we're going to deep dive on meta a little bit more. So Meta is, I know, a controversial ad channel for some controversial channel in general, just to manage and try to look for donations.        

00:02:07
            

So give us your kind of just 30,000 foot view of meta as a channel for nonprofits when it comes to fundraising. Yeah, it's, it's a channel that I'd usually start with if you're just getting started, you know, the Google Ad grant is great. I consider those kind of training wheels. And then Meta is a really great place to get started when you're starting with paid ads. And so it can work for the small local nonprofit as well as a larger enterprise nonprofit.        

00:02:36
            

Whether it's getting leads, whether it's getting donations, whether it's maximizing your brand efficiency and reached, Meta is always a good place to start for those use cases. Cool. If someone is just getting started, what's the first ad campaign you would ever test in Meta for a nonprofit. Let's just say if they're just doing general brand awareness to start. Yeah, the first thing that I would do is find out if you have your value proposition worked out of.        

00:03:12
            

If you've got your value proposition figured out, you're really ahead of the game. And what I mean by value proposition is why do people give to your organization? And so if you understand why people give, use their language in their ads, that's going to go really far, no Matter where you put it. If you have that on your donation page, if you have it in your ads. And so how does that correlate to the first ad campaign?        

00:03:41
            

Well, it correlates because you can do ad messaging testing for basically $50 or less to test different, what we call concepts. And it's testing the different value propositions in rapid succession to find out where your wins are in terms of what resonates, what gets your audience shaking their head yes. And understands very clearly what your organization does and how you serve, who you serve. That's awesome. So with that kind of micro testing model, how long of a timeline is that all happened within a few days?        

00:04:23
            

Is that a few weeks? How many campaigns are you talking about running to kind of get that data on? What gets your audience shaking their head yes to your offer? Yeah. So each micro test takes 24 hours and it usually costs dollar 25 or less for each microtest.        

00:04:39
            

So when I said $50, I just ran one for 72 hours and it concluded three tests. So we had a headline test, an image test and a description test, but it was basically another headline test. So all in all, it's testing those different messaging, those messages as value proposition, and then also images that work well for where you could insert them anywhere. Say it's a swipe file. If you're familiar with marketing terminology, it's what you would put in your swipe file for your organization.        

00:05:18
            

Cool. And so those microtests are just like deep in the ignorance pool here, right? So micro tests are just going to a donation like page. Are they going anywhere? Or are they just literally just testing the headline to see how many people click, how many impressions they get?        

00:05:34
            

Are they actually terminating anywhere? That is a great question. So with these, these are run a little bit differently than normal meta ads campaigns. And so what we're doing is we're only trying to get about 400 impressions from these. And what we're looking for is just a click.        

00:05:51
            

And if we get a click on under 400 impressions and it's under a dollar CPC, we consider that a win. And so that would be one that you would add to the swipe file at that point. Awesome. Awesome. And so how many of these do you want to run before you say, okay, we've got enough data to build a whole campaign on this?        

00:06:10
            

Yeah. So generally you can do up to 20. So up to 20 images, up to 20 headlines in a campaign. And like I said, you'll run it for about 24 hours, then anything that's got under a dollar per CPC is the one that you would pull out and consider that a win. Now, another important thing to note on this, and we could put together a general one pager resource guide if you were interested in a campaign like this.        

00:06:40
            

But there are automated rules within Facebook, within meta, that help you pause the ad set or the ad specifically, so that it doesn't run over 400 impressions. Okay, cool. So that kind of is your upper limit, like rate limit, right. So you're not just end up accidentally spending way too much money on a micro test. Right, right.        

00:07:04
            

And these are indicators. These are ones that are most valid to test. So instead of coming up with an idea and writing out all of your funnel, this is a way to say, hey, these are the ones that are most proven to be likely to succeed. So let's see if we can craft a message from what we have here. Take these elements and put them together into something that we believe will ultimately convert and have a higher throughput than just taking a shot at the dark with something that we've put together.        

00:07:39
            

Yeah. Okay, so we kind of talked about the micro testing, right, to be able to test just all the different elements, images, headlines, kind of subheadings, and doing that really, really cheap to figure out what's the main value prop for your audience when it comes to meta ads, do you see it more as a brand awareness tool or is it really a tool that can actually be used to get new donations? Absolutely, it can be used for both and more specifically for donations. It's a great place to start when you're looking to prospect for new donors. And so there's two things that are really critical when it comes to generating new donors online on Facebook.        

00:08:18
            

And I'll say three. One, we won't talk about, which is tracking, that's more so getting set up on your Facebook pixel, things like that, server to server tracking. But there's two things that are more so broadly more important, and that's the audience that you're targeting, which we'll touch on today. And then also the creative, which we kind of previously touched on which is how to find your best creative to put out there that will get the best response. Well, hey there.        

00:08:51
            

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00:09:56
            

so let's dive into audience, right? Like, what are some general best practices for trying to figure out who the audience is? I mean, I'm imagining it's not just going into meta and saying, hey, I generally want to hit people 45 to 65 in our state who like this page or that page, right? Like, it's a little more sophisticated than that, I'm guessing, in terms of how we need to run these audiences, right? Yeah, absolutely.        

00:10:21
            

And as time has gone on with meta, it's best to stay as broad as possible, because the pixel will learn who will gravitate towards your messaging. But if you're just starting out, you know your audience best. And so you kind of need to put those guardrails on Facebook, on meta to let them know, hey, we're kind of looking in this direction. So how you balance that out is really looking at, you know, what I would look at first is if you're a local nonprofit or if you're a national nonprofit. And so based on that understanding, looking in your and CRM or your ideal core demographic, like, who responds most to the message that you're looking to get out there?        

00:11:09
            

And so if you're looking for families within the, within the local area, you know, I would look at targeting people that are, you know, in their thirties to fifties, that are within driving distance of your church. And so driving distance is another thing to consider, if you're, if you're talking about a local nonprofit that serves an area versus somebody who may know that their audience is more female, between 45 and 65, you may target in that way. But as far as performance, fundraising, when it comes to raising donations, where I would really start, before we get into demographic information is the place that I would start, is just creating a lookalike audience based on your donor file. So Facebook says if you have 1000 people within your database, you can upload that and you can create a match that will find people who are most likely to look like what your file upload looks like. So I would consider that if you were to think about rings on a bullseye, that would be your center.        

00:12:29
            

Bullseye. And so a lookalike audience could be, it creates an audience that's about 2 million people. So you go from 1000 people to people who look like your ideal profile for 2 million people. A second close one that I would look at is retargeting people on your donation page that didn't actually give. So if they visited your donation page, that's as close as they're going to get to becoming a donor.        

00:13:06
            

But if they didn't make that donation for some reason, that's another audience that's really good to target for nonprofits. Yeah, yeah. And that all goes back into tracking with that Facebook pixel. Right. And having that actually set up on your site correctly.        

00:13:20
            

What? Absolutely. If a nonprofit's out there, because I've heard this before. Oh, we tried meta ads. They don't work.        

00:13:26
            

We've tried this. They don't work. It's garbage. It doesn't do this. Help us understand.        

00:13:31
            

So first thing. Cause my theory is a lot of times they actually don't, nonprofits don't spend enough money actually running a test. Like, they throw dollar 50 at it and they're like, eh, it didn't work. We didn't get donor out of it. Sorry, it doesn't work.        

00:13:43
            

What's kind of minimum threshold do you recommend in terms of how much to actually spend once they've tested? Right. Then the micro testing on a, let's say one, a brand awareness campaign, and then second, how much to spend on a, a new donor acquisition campaign on Meta? Yeah. So in general, you want to spend at least ten times what you expect what your CPA to be.        

00:14:09
            

So if you're not sure yet, what I would say is start out with $2,500, and then at that point you'll have enough to spend a daily amount. That should validate what you should validate a baseline. And so in general, you'll see within five to seven days your performance will generally show a baseline or it'll show a trend where it's going to baseline. And so I would give it five to seven days without touching it at all. So if you're just getting started, you're not sure where to start.        

00:14:47
            

Start with a budget of $2,500. Give it five to seven days to see where it's going to baseline, and then you'll have an idea whether or not where performance will be cool. And any thoughts on using meta just for general brand awareness, just for brand building of audiences and how you would do that, notoriously, that's going to be hard to track the ROI on that. So any thoughts on using meta ads for general brand awareness? Yeah, generally it's my media buying side that really kicks into gear for that when I start thinking about like how big is your audience and then figuring out what it is for touches per user.        

00:15:31
            

So generally, if you look at brand awareness, you do see that there are that organizations that cultivate their donors throughout the year have bigger year end gifts. So if you're really doing a good job in cultivation and messaging in terms of like keeping up on your emails, your emails are getting opened. You've got a healthy house file. You know, it may not quite be for you, but if you're someone else who has hasdeenen, they're not reaching their entire house file. Maybe there's some disengaged users that you want to reengage.        

00:16:13
            

Maybe you wanted to get them multi channel, you wanted to get them from offline, which is postal. You wanted to see if you could activate them online. All of those are really great use cases for building brand awareness, making sure that you have a strong year end. Awesome. I love it.        

00:16:31
            

Yeah. And so what we're not saying, I don't think is, hey, be lazy for ten months out of the year, and then in November go and dump $10,000 into meta ads for brand awareness and hope you still get your nice end of year pop. Right. It always happens. And while, while you will see some improvement from it, it's best to cultivate that through the year.        

00:16:52
            

Yeah, absolutely. That's, that's great. So if someone doesn't have any meta ads running right now, we're going to recommend start out 25, start out micro testing, right, some of these kind of key headlines, images. Then we're going to suggest $2,500 as an ad. Spend five to seven days to see what's actually working.        

00:17:11
            

Get kind of a good baseline and then from there talk to us about some of the more advanced stuff you can do with meta, obviously, like shameless plug. We've got some tools that we think work really well in terms of building lookalike audiences based on your current website traffic. But give us some of the kind of advanced stuff for those who say, oh yeah, okay, we're already doing this kind of stuff. Yeah, absolutely. So one of the new things that we're testing is a partner network through personify.        

00:17:37
            

And so personify basically has a network from, you know, if someone did their, basically what it does is like it, it identifies some of the anonymous users that didn't convert and it gives you that audience information so that you can then go and utilize it for email marketing. You can utilize it for Facebook targeting. We're seeing some really good results from that so far on the email marketing and the Facebook targeting side. And so what it does is basically you put a pixel on your website and then it starts giving you the audience information of people who are visiting your website to start build your CRM list. So if you are using it for lead generation, you may be paying Facebook for leads.        

00:18:34
            

And this will start building your leads just automatically within your CRM database. And so having your CRM be filled with potential leads is really great. The second thing is being able to use it as first party data to create lookalike audiences. And so we talked about that bullseye of the donors look alike. Well, with personify, the tool, we're seeing that it is closely following as the second best option, even past house files.        

00:19:11
            

So people who are on your list but haven't donated yet, this audience is actually converting better and turning prospective donors into activating them for actual donors. That's amazing. And so that allows essentially someone to have a whole new audience channel they didn't have previously, that are people who have visited their website. So there's at least awareness of the brand, but haven't actually converted to give their email address, right? Absolutely.        

00:19:42
            

So if you were to target a cold audience or anything like that, or even if you were to say to use the pixel, these things are temporary in terms of these audiences with privacy going away and pixels not matching as often as they can, specifically with meta and Google, this one actually gives you the first party data, which is the email address, which then you can follow up with them. And we know like email as a channel is the highest ROI channel. So there's a case for that. And then also there's a case for owning that information so that you can then target them as a retargeting campaign and finally doing it as a lookalike. So that's what we're doing currently, is testing the lookalike and also building some of that data audience insights.        

00:20:49
            

So if somebody visits your page, we're looking into. We're building it. It's in beta right now where we can see, like, what is that Persona of the person visiting your site and be able to turn that anonymous click into a Persona or a user base that we would understand why they're visiting your site. Yeah, super exciting stuff coming out, man. And excited for all the work you put in.        

00:21:18
            

Yeah, excited to get that launch out in the wild with some of those new features here soon. Why don't we do this? I think it'd be helpful for someone to know. We mentioned the tracking, like tracking Facebook Pixel on your site, being able to actually attribute revenue correctly. I think one of the things a lot of the nonprofits struggle with is maybe they run an ad campaign, but they really do struggle sometimes with, okay, how do you get this set up for actually tracking properly?        

00:21:44
            

Is it possible in a quick snapshot, to kind of give the basic steps of how you'd set up to make sure that you're tracking correctly from your Facebook campaign? Yeah, I mean, the basics of it are that you'll want to, that you'll want to get set up with through Google Tag manager. And so if you go to Tagmanager dot google.com and you install the Pixel through that, so they have a template, that's the easiest way to get started is to install it through tag manager. And so sometimes you already have that installed on your website, tag manager. And basically it's a way for you to take all these different marketing tags, whether it be Facebook, Google Analytics, LinkedIn, TikTok, there's different tags that people say put on your site for your pop ups and so on and so forth.        

00:22:43
            

It's a way for it to house all that information. They've made it really easy to just basically copy and paste the code and install it. And then the second thing is, when it comes to tracking donations and the values of donations, that's where I would reach out to Matt or myself or developer that, you know, to help set up some of this e commerce tracking, because it's a little bit more in depth in order to track the revenue to feed back to the Pixel and start getting an ROI on your spin, on your ad spend. Yeah. And that's where it really does come down.        

00:23:28
            

To what sort of donation software you're using. Right. Like, are you on, you know, are you on donor box? Are you on we give. Are you on fundraise up?        

00:23:37
            

You know, like, some of those tools are all a little different with how you set those up in the Google tag manager. So definitely something that if you're looking for help on that, feel free to reach out. We'd love to connect you with the right people for that. Cool. Yeah.        

00:23:50
            

Any last thoughts on meta? Anything that you're seeing with meta that you think is exciting or that you want to share?        

00:23:57
            

I would say that's the channel that I would start first. When it comes to, if you're looking at Google, if you've got your Google Ad grant up and running and you're looking to put some paid ads out there and you really want to see results from them, I would definitely start with meta first and branch out from there. Very cool. Well, thanks so much, man. I appreciate it.        

00:24:17
            

Absolutely. Thank you.        

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