99. Some Personal News (SPN)
How to ensure your budget works harder than most
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Get access and you too could be equipped to provide a top-drawer donor experience.
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In this week’s SPN:
It’s Time to Experiment
Human Oversight - How to ensure your budget works harder than most
Why You Should Decide, not the tech
Jobs & Opps that caught my eye this week
Let’s dig in!
It's Time to Experiment
One area where I see real tangible benefits from AI is in the Ads delivered by major platforms. And Amazon, Google and Meta certainly lead the arms race where they use tech to meet and beat advertiser expectations.
Amazon, for example, spent all week trumpeting their performance plus, which uses 1st party data and ML to automate campaign setup, audience creation, and optimization. Meta also began rolling out video generation and text generation.
Using these tools will require Orgs to hand over a large element of control. It’s worth thinking through how you feel about handing over that control. In my conversations this week (small sample size and all growth focused Orgs) people generally felt that the ends justify the means.
Did you spot this week that Open AI have a search product coming down the line? Designed to rival Google Gemini and the startup Perplexity, it would let ChatGPT users search and results link to sources like Wikipedia. Food for thought as to where and how donors will be searching for information.
Getting people to switch from Google is nie on impossible though and the $20B Google pay Apple annually (to be the default search engine on iPhones) should remind us of the power of defaults! If OpenAI can hold on to significant levels of traffic a bundled search tool could impact Google. But there’s a lot to do.
And I thought this would interest you - a Meta exec shared a fascinating study looking at 700k meta ad campaigns across 200k advertisers. Their findings:
"Not only do we find large and persistent differences across firms in advertising returns, but there are also predictable differences, namely, there seems to be substantial learning by doing, as well as significant returns to being more sophisticated data users."
Full report here. As SPN has shared often: It’s Time to Experiment.
Jobs & Opps 🛠️
Patrick J McGovern Foundation: Learning & Insights Lead ($85,000 - $115,000)
MS Society: Philanthropy Manager (£41,260 - £43,735)
British Red Cross: Head of Internal Communications and Engagement (£62,000 + London weighting)
Etsy: Impact and Sustainability Specialist ($96,000 - $124,000)
Doctors Without Borders USA: Major Gifts Officer ($88,800 - $111,000)
WWF International: Manager, Digital Fundraising (£50,000 - £56,000)
UNICC: Head, Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning Unit (P-4)
IOM UN Immigration: Chief, Digital Engagement Division (P-5)
UNICEF: Digital Communication Specialist (P-3)
Literary Arts: Senior Director, Development & Community Engagement ($120,000 - $140,000)
Protect Your Budget… while maintaining quality and price
Look at this screenshot!! 6 ads! Is this happening to your Org’s paid media ads?
Context: Forbes ran a spammy “Made for Advertising” (MFA) subdomain www3.forbes.com for 7 years. And it cost advertisers huge sums of (wasted) money.
Apparently up to 28% of impressions that Advertisers believed were being served on Forbes.com appeared on the www3 subdomain instead. Meanwhile, according to Forbes, it accounted for only 1% of their traffic.
The number being thrown around is 200! An average user must have been bombarded with around 2-0-0 ads in a single page view. Wild. The worst part is that none of those 200 impressions drove intentional clicks.
The screenshot is a perfect example of advertising fraud perpetrated by one of the seemingly most trustworthy publishers. And the biggest advertisers, agencies, and tech platforms fell for it.
How can Orgs prevent it from happening to their budgets?
Consider each bullet (5) outlined below as one hour of your time smartly invested per month:
1. Don’t trust any tech to do the work for you. The ad verification tools your team or agency is using now (Integral Ad Science or Double Verify), “header bidding,” “Ads.txt,” automated bidding, and all the other buzzwordy solutions meant to prevent this exact scenario failed in the Forbes example - and are failing right now with thousands of other shady websites operated by others.
The best we can do to prevent it from happening is manual validation of impressions. Ask your team or agency for a monthly “impression health quality” report including all the websites where more than one impression was served. With basic Excel filters, highlight the websites that have any of the following:
Numerical digits in the URL (to highlight the “www3”s of the world)
More than three dots in the URL (to highlight the sub-domains)
Any special symbols in the URL (-, $, @, and others)
These three rules will cover most spammy URLs and only take 1 hour a month to run through.
2. Dig into the worst and the best 10% of your CTR. Step #1 weeds out the most obvious spam but doesn’t capture websites that are more creative with fraud or simply have too many ad slots per page.
The next step is to analyze your Creative Click-Through Rate reports.
Depending on how many creative assets you’re running at any given time, ask your team or agency to run a monthly report by asset (if you can review them all one by one) or by creative concept (typically if you have more than ten assets running simultaneously), including websites where it was served, impressions, and clicks.
Filter out websites with less than 100 impressions.
Sort the report by CTR and focus on the best 10% and worst 10%, manually checking if those websites seem legitimate.
Most spammy websites that aren’t fraudulent but aren’t worth your budget either drive too many clicks - “fat finger” syndrome, overloading mobile pages with too many creatives. Some drive no clicks at all because of an overload of Ad Slots on the desktop page.
This simple report will weed out both scenarios and shouldn’t take more than 1 hour a month either.
3. Go beyond clicks and weed out the bot clicks. Bots develop alongside the Anti-Bot tools and get smarter with things like dynamic IP addresses or calculated frequency of “clicking” to avoid being captured by the report in step #2. However, bots never convert.
Here’s an proven way to catch them:
Run a monthly report within each Ad Group or Campaign with the same targeting, including Clicks and Conversions by website.
Exclude websites with fewer than 50 clicks unless your organization’s website's average conversion rate is higher than 2%.
Filter only the bottom 10% of websites based on the resulting Conversion Rate, and validate those manually.
These 3 steps mainly apply to Programmatic and Paid Social campaigns (for Paid Social, replace “website” with “group”, “category,” or “platform” – the trends will be the same). Ad quality issues are equally widespread in paid search. Capturing those issues proves to be much more complicated.
This particular conversions report worked very well in weeding out keywords that my competitors used to drain the budget. One SEM-specific way I found is below.
4. Run the Location x Time of Day report. Run the report by Location and Time of Day, including Impressions, Clicks, and Conversions.
The goal is to run it in the broadest location possible, allowing you to determine the time zone. For the US, “State” is the easiest one. For the EU and Asia, it should be “Country.”
Group the locations by time zone and look for trends where Clicks jump up but Conversions don’t. You’re looking for spikes outside the “normal” ones, which usually occur in the morning “commute” time of 7-9 a.m. and evening’s 6-9 p.m.
If there are unusual spikes outside of these hours in any of the locations, dig deeper into the Keywords and Devices that drive them.
Chances are it will only be a few keywords and the same device type - exclude them from targeting those locations.
5. Dig into the inventory priced at the top-and-bottom 10%. For every channel, the worst-performing inventory is usually either the lowest or the highest priced. And while the lowest part is most obvious - we’re used to being critical of the cheapest, shadiest clicks, websites, platforms - the top 10% catches most by surprise.
As the Forbes example proves, expensive doesn’t mean “good”. Impressions on www3.forbes.com were selling for the same price as the ones on the primary, “good” domain. If that most expensive website, TV channel, or social platform isn’t driving the best Cost per Donation, chances are you aren’t getting the value back in mysterious brand awareness and ad recall that premium inventory is supposed to generate either.
Unlike adopting a new marketing automation tool or breaking the Donor Lifecycle down into steps, these five reports are very easy to implement and I’d argue absolutely worth your, your team’s, or your agency’s time.
These 5 reports and hours invested a month of human oversight of the technology should ensure your budget works harder than most other Orgs.
Ok, that’s all for today!
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And huge thanks to this Quarter’s sponsor Fundraise Up for creating a new standard for online giving.
Now onto the interesting stuff!
Reads From My Week
Getting it to 80% was fast but the last 20% took most of our time (LinkedIn Engineering Blog)
How B&Q built a new creative framework for cross-platform campaign success (Google)
A good look at the various AI video generators and how they stack up (dantaylorwatt.com)
Amazon continue to innovate and have new ad formats for Prime Video that are shoppable.
AdAge look at one controversial Agency growth engine; Principal-based buying, when agencies buy and resell media, raises conflict and transparency issues.
How Snapchat is saving itself – and keeping up with Silicon Valley giants (The Guardian)
Accelerating AI-Driven Marketing Maturity (BCG)
The Battle for Attention (The New Yorker)
Social algorithms must change to protect children (Ofcom - BBC News)