70. Some Personal News
Quality of Exposure Matters
A very warm welcome to all the new subscribers. I’m thrilled to have you as readers and truly appreciate your feedback and support.
Are your paid ads, email and reporting sitting in three separate systems? Do they struggle to talk to each other? Wouldn’t it be more efficient to have them all housed and integrated under one roof? Then it sounds like you might find Feathr super valuable. Think Hubspot but built specifically for nonprofits. Check it out for yourself - feathr.co
Today’s SPN includes the following:
Why Reach is a means to an end, not an end in itself.
What tools are you curious about adopting?
How to navigate rising media costs.
What to fine tune in your funnel → broken down by metric.
Launching a mini YouTube Series.
As with every edition of SPN please reach out with any questions or comments. I respond to every single one.
Let’s dig in.
Noticeability Really Counts
This week I read Paul Feldwick’s excellent book “Why Does the Pedlar Sing: What Creativity Really Means in Advertising.”
In it he refers to the power of fame. He talks a lot about the advertising business’ cultish misunderstanding of ‘creativity’ and how it risks forgetting how to appeal to the public.
You get to be famous by being noticed. Not (just) by reaching some poorly defined media metric that’s only there to help inform what is, at the end of the day, a refined guess - an estimate.
Is the concept of “reach” having something of a moment?
It seems as if when challenged on metrics like impressions, many practitioners who surely should know better start pivoting towards reach. The other week I sat through a marketing presentation where the Org talked about having ‘a crisis in reach.’
My two cents: There is no crisis in reach. If the media numbers bother you that much go and buy a national OOH campaign. What there is though is a crisis in understanding what exactly the word ‘reach’ means.
Reach is the % of the target estimated to have had an opportunity to see the campaign or ad at least once. It isn’t a hard concept to grasp.
What is hard, and what is therefore duly ignored, is the notion that it really isn’t wise to compare apples to oranges.
Ask yourself, or indeed your favorite agency rep the following:
“You say I’ll reach 80% of my prospective donor target with this video campaign. Can you explain what you mean by ‘reach’?”
“Ah, so 80% will see my ad. How long for?”
“And if in my judgement 2 seconds isn’t sufficient to get my message across, what proportion see, say 10 seconds?”
“And when you say ‘see’ what exactly do you mean? Is it they see the program or block in which the ad appears, or the ad itself?”
“And does the number refer to the device, or the donors using the device?”
At the most basic level this goes back to the issue of definition. What is a viewer, and what criteria do you need to satisfy in order to qualify as one? Context is also important.
Org’s really shouldn’t care about reach, impressions or unskippable video ads with a 98% completion rate… Rather these should be viewed as staging posts along the way to fundraising. If ‘X’ reach leads to ‘Y’ fundraising dollars then great, but what matters at the end of the day is the ‘Y’ fundraising dollars. Especially during Q4.
It may very well be that less reach, however defined but made up of exposures in quality environments that are not just ‘seen’ but noticed, is what really matters.
Rigorous research evidence or not, noticeability really counts and whilst it’s easy to say if no-one has the opportunity to see the ad then by definition no-one could notice it, that assumes we can’t keep two concepts in our heads at the same time.
Quality of exposure matters a lot when it comes to assessing eventual outcomes. Bear this in mind as you turn on the burners ahead of EOY. Media metrics like reach are a staging post along the way. They’re a means to an end. Not the end in themselves.
🎤Casting Call🎤
I’m recording a mini YouTube series. The premise is a straight talking, RFI/RFP-lite type conversation that explores marketing and fundraising tools, interviews the vendors, asks the hard questions, and then comes up with a score/ranking at the end.
Are you considering a new fundraising platform for the new year? Is your marketing automation and campaign management platform up for renewal in 2024? Or perhaps you’re in the midst of comparing cyber security tools or chatbot tools?
» Hit “reply” - I’d love to hear which Tool/Platform I should interview and what challenging questions you’re wrestling with that I can pose to these vendors.
The Ever-Rising Cost of Media
Record-breaking inflation has been a topic of conversation in every consumer spending category this year.
A connected topic is the ever-rising cost of media. It became a hot topic once again after a recent – and staggering - acknowledgment by Google’s VP of Ads.
As part of the ongoing federal antitrust case they shared that Google has been quietly raising prices for the end advertiser by up to 10% to meet their quotas and not get punished by Wall Street. What the ducking duck, Google! 🦆
CPMs are up 100%+ since 2020
Of course, Google claim that advertisers never pay more than the maximum bid they set in the system, and the algorithm still holds. I’ve little doubt Google will continue to introduce more black-box algorithms such as Performance Max and continue to take advantage of Org’s trusting it more than they should.
It hasn’t only been Google. Hunch reported that Facebook, YouTube, and TikTok CPMs are 100%+ compared to 2020. Snapchat has grown “only” by 65%.
I’ve shared four (and a half) thoughts below on what we can do about this - or not - and then let’s get into the meat of the post → ensuring the good health of your marketing and fundraising program.
First off, don’t hedge that prices will come down. Unlike in consumer markets, no deflation is possible – neither is a disruptive competitor en route to force others to decrease their prices. TikTok could have been one but by now they’re already more expensive than Meta ~ Facebook.
CPM is the only metric outside of your control. The cost of media doesn’t directly affect your ROAS, Cost per Donor, or even Cost per Click. Most media is paid for on a per-impression basis. This cost per impression is the cost of doing business that your Org can’t control. BUT you do control the rules to choose which impressions to pursue and which not to.
Adapt your digital fundraising model to the growing inventory cost, instead of looking for cheaper inventory. Looking for cheaper inventory sources is a race to the bottom. Yes, you can find a programmatic platform that charges less than others, and you can increase the share of Microsoft Bing instead of Google in your search.
Yet playing that game just makes your Org blind to the declining effectiveness of the algorithms. Cheaper bottom-of-the-barrel inventory and higher volumes might cover up the declining effectiveness for awhile but just know it will inevitably come to a sharp end because of the ever-rising prices. And you’ll be none the wiser and far poorer for it.
Lastly, don’t change your ROAS/Revenue goals because of the growing inventory cost. Many Org’s will find themselves with significantly lower returns on advertising spend, which in turn will challenge their ability to keep investing in digital fundraising or fund some of their programs.
The only way around this is to not decrease your ROAS. Instead, increase the effectiveness of your “conversion vehicle”. See below.
Increase Conversion Effectiveness: A To-Do-Check-List
So here it is → a to-do-check-list - broken down by metric - to fine tune your conversion elements and maintain the good health of your fundraising program.
CPM
Assume it growing by 10% YoY whenever going through a budgeting cycle. It’s likely to be lower than that – but positive surprises are better than negative ones.
Break down your CPM into elements and eliminate what is unnecessary.
This point mainly applies to your paid social, video, and programmatic campaigns – not SEM.
Get rid of expensive 3rd party audience targeting when you’re not using it or can replace it with a cheaper yet better working 1st party. Cookie-based audiences are becoming obsolete and inefficient but many Org’s are still using them – paying big dollars to providers such as BlueKai for barely working audiences. Why?!
Update your exclusion - and inclusion- lists of websites and ad exchanges - excluding expensive sources that aren’t driving above-average performance.
CTR
Monitor – and “fix” – your Mobile inventory share or optimize separately for Mobile and Desktop. Mobile, by nature, has higher CTR than Desktop skewing the metrics but not translating to better performance. Also, cheaper inventory on mobile tends to have even higher CTR due to still-existing fraud.
Revise your content library – which assets that are not performing? Drop them.
If you still need to do it, adopt dynamic creative personalized to your target audiences instead of serving everybody with the same assets.
(for SEM only) Review your account structure focusing on Quality Score - you want your average to be at least 7. Are you matching the language of your ad text directly to donor search terms and creating a unique ad for each keyword group?
This sounds controversial and can be easily mistaken for focusing on a vanity metric – but CTR should be on the live dashboard that your team is reviewing, especially if you’ve structured it as a step in the Donor Lifecycle.
Tactical: If you keep the CPM within 10% growth YoY and maintain the Mobile vs Desktop share but increase your CTR by more than 10%, you can compensate and reduce your CPCs.
Conversion Rate (CVR)
Treat your landing pages as you treat your creative assets – optimize them constantly and personalize them to your audience.
Optimize the vitals of your website – page load speed is an excellent primary metric to look at. Most Org’s I know have given Website management to their technology teams. Don’t overlook the impact product or web performance has on overall fundraising.
Average Donation Value (ADV)
Take a page out of Google’s strategy book and test gradually increasing $ options on the donation form – by 2-3% at a time. You could test it by channel source depending on what your data says. A slight increase in ADV will cover the small drop in the CVR and contribute to the lifetime value – keeping more long-term donors in the funnel. Admittedly this is a balancing act.
Ensure as many payment options as possible.
Pay attention to the basics of your donation forms – the speed at which they load, how much info you’re asking for that you need vs want, the drop in “checkout clicks” to actual donations that might signal certain lags, etc.
Lifetime Value (LTV)
Growing your investment to increase the value of existing donors by at least 10% a year while maintaining the ROI targets isn’t just possible, it’s a must. Set this target. It should motivate teams to innovate and decrease the churn rate.
This final point is crucial to the long-term success of your program.
So, there you have it ~15 bullets that will propel your individual giving program into fantastic health, regardless of the increased cost of media - what did I miss?
Now onto the fun stuff!
Reads of My Week
How to build (and spot) a great corporate accelerator.
Where are the investment opportunities in the kids digital media space?
Addictive, absurdly cheap and controversial: the rise of China’s Temu app.
Shopping without shopping: Why the future of commerce is contextual.
GroupM created a new ad format for Amazon that enables creator content to be incorporated. The Drum shared it’s working well with a 300% increase in clickthrough.
Target are planning a one-stop shop for partners to plan, activate and measure their retail media campaigns as they continue to sign up media partners where their data can be activated.
Google advise What AI can and can’t do - and what that means for marketers.
ITV Rolls Out Addressable Ads On Linear Broadcast Channels.
Netflix do Brand Cathedrals: Netflix to Open Stores Where Fans Can Play, Shop and Eat in 2025.