Some Personal News
#27 Donor lifecycle management, Ad Tech and SNAP's insane numbers
Happy Sunday. A very warm welcome to all the new subscribers. I’m thrilled to have you as readers and truly appreciate your feedback and support.
In this post I’ll cover:
The challenge for TTD and the rest of AdTech
How to leverage Google’s CDP-lite platform (GA4) in your marketing
Savannah Bananas
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SNAP!
Snap doesn’t get the attention it deserves. Lots of news from their Investors day - including:
750M monthly active users, 375M daily active users
Avg of ~13 snaps created per DAU per day
2/3rd of users engage with AR daily
Time on Spotlight (TikTok clone) grew 100% y/y
2.5M subs to Snap+ bringing in >$100M ARR
Ad Tech
If you only read one thing today I’d make it this investor presentation that The Trade Desk shared as part of their recent results announcement. And it seems no one told them about the advertising downturn - they were 24% up for Q4 year on year and for the year as a whole they were up 32%. Maybe the downturn is limited to the platforms hit by ATT?
I listened to The Trade Desk (TTD) ceo on a pod last week. He was very interesting on adtech and buy side vs sell side on this podcast. Maybe skip the first 24 mins on culture and team though.
The challenge for TTD and the rest of AdTech is to ride the switch of money to hot new areas; newTV, Merchant Media (eg Walmart, Tesco), TikTok, Amazon and Apple. They don't need the plumbing to deal with millions of inventory sources. I’d estimate legitimate sources of inventory in both newTV and Merchant are in the thousands.
And along with the complicated plumbing, risks of fraud and brand safety issues, lots of the money evaporates. A good report attempting to answer how much in fees ad tech companies are charging publishers & advertisers gives us this gem:
Just like the smart money on the open web is moving to Private Marketplace deals, I see spend in these new areas looking for the same safe space.
Arete are on a similar page and this summary of a talk last week is a great take on the health of AdTech:
Some of the new entrants are bullish - with both Uber and Lyft claiming rapid growth - Uber claiming a run rate of $500m a year and Lyft talking of sales up 7 fold. And Uber are trying new formats across the customer journey. Interesting times in AdTech.
Donor Lifecycle Management
I wanted to continue to unpick the concept of “Centers of Excellence for donor understanding and engagement” from last week and talk about how you can leverage Google Analytics 4 immediately as a CDP-lite platform in your marketing.
Here are some events to track. For illustrative purposes I’ll use the ones I’ve seen most frequently for today’s post:
First website visit
First donation – general cause
First donation – emergency cause
First donation – special cause (e.g., local food bank)
Second donation – same cause
Second donation – change of cause
Monthly donation
Monthly donations cancelation
I’m purposely simplifying the above funnel – and not adding things like donation size. While undoubtedly helpful, too many dimensions frequently lead to a lack of focus – and, therefore, a lack of action.
Using the above 8 “events” that donors are moving through, which of the below visuals most likely represents a typical donor behavior – Linear, Circular, or “Messy-Chaotic”?
While I’d love for #2 to be the correct answer it isn’t. I carefully crafted the third diagram to be the absolute truth: monthly donation must be started before it’s canceled, and the second donation can only happen after the first one. This isn’t a set of randomly connected dots, yet it still looks so messy!
This isn’t groundbreaking news. Neither would be me saying that every one of these events likely has a different value and is worth an additional price. So why is this so much more important now than it was a year ago?
Because the “dots” are not what matters. It’s all about the “arrows”. Those arrows above, on the third image, are your guide to an above-average performing digital fundraising strategy – and they only got this powerful (for most users) with the release of GA4.
I wrote extensively last week about how Google seems to be building a “common market CDP” with their release of GA4, specifically with the 26-month lifespan for log-in information instead of 6 months for cookies. If you missed it – read it HERE. So now, we have a system that:
Effectively – and deterministically – resolves identity amongst multiple devices
Allows to record “state” of users – the Events above
Keeps User ID the same for 26 months
Can export this data – with 0% loss – to an advertising platform
The above is not a revolution. Salesforce Marketing Cloud was enabling the same for a while with Journey Builder. LiveRamp made it possible for cookies. There were others. But all of them were doing it at a considerable price. They were enterprise solutions – and Google made it “retail” with the push to GA4, which will only grow in its adoption amongst smaller organizations without millions to spend on digital marketing. I don’t praise Google for many things they’re doing – but, credit where credit’s due…
Here is how you can make use of it immediately in your marketing:
1. Map out the events that matter for your organization. You might have done it already this – then make sure those are the right ones. They should be “donor states,” critical distinguishing qualification criteria. You will add their value later – we’ll get there. For those of us who have been in B2B marketing – think of MQL vs. SQL vs. Prospect.
2. Map out the potential Movements between those stages. This should be straightforward.
3. Move from the “Messy-Chaotic” graph to a table. For example, the chart above can be transformed to the following table:
Cells within the bold border show all the possible campaign strategies you can – and should – create. This is what most of the CDPs do – they help you build customer journey scenarios. But we can go one step further.
4. Identify your core priorities. Not all the journeys are the ones you need to be creating – some are a pure waste of time, money, and effort. Note below:
Green cells are the journeys to be promoted, and the red ones are to be prevented. By setting Display and SEM campaigns, with the corresponding creative, following the logic above, you can recreate the same experience the multi-million CDP would create for you for a fraction of the cost.
One step further would be to impose even more focus on your campaigns – and start segmenting donors not only by the “line of behavior” but by the AOV, the recency of their last donation, etc. The key here is to ensure you’re not adding information to create more campaigns – but, instead, are using it to filter out the less valuable donors and allocate more dollars to the ones worth it for your organization.
Final thought – since you’d be using Google Ads to activate these audiences and the data flows with no losses between the systems, you can “append” characteristics such as the number of sessions from Paid Search or even Display Impressions (~post-view sessions) to your audiences, to truly make GA4 into a “CDP-lite” and manage cross-channel frequency.
Of course, it will not be the same as a fully-implemented – and fully-utilized – Salesforce C360 or an in-house marketing data lake. You still won’t be able to manage channels outside of the Google environment or measure the impact of your campaigns as Market Share within a specific segment. But it will 100% get you out of second gear (average digital fundraising) and have you nicely humming along.
Millions of Savannah Bananas
Marketing Brew has a terrific article this week about how the Savannah Bananas, a baseball team, attracted millions of followers in just three years. I’ve been watching them on TikTok - all because of their marketing.
If you’ve yet to see them or want to understand how an intern helped them become TikTok famous, check this article out. They took a product that has stayed relatively the same over the last century and tweaked it to play into fans and social media. And have sold out every game since 2016. Lots of learnings to be had.
Jobs & Opps
If you’re searching for a new role or contemplating a change, let me know how I can help you.
Charity Water: Chief Technology Officer
Comic Relief US: Director, Digital Growth & Giving
Ellen MacArthur Foundation: Lead North America
Environmental Defense Fund: Senior Director Donor Engagement
GiveDirectly: VP, Development
Greenpeace UK: Fundraising Director
Human Rights First: Digital Director
National MS Society: VP Content Strategy
Save the Children International: Digital Fundraising Manager for Emerging Markets
Women’s Refugee Commission: Senior Director of Individual Engagement and Marketing
Reads of My Week
New research from Kantar gives us even more evidence of the positive effects of creative on ad performance and even profit.
Deep Dive: Buying Programmatic Ads On The Open Web.
Why The Fractional CMO Position Seems To Be Catching On.
The implications of this update from Google are that AI-generated content must be tailored to the user's search intent, optimized for SEO, and regularly updated in order to be successful. Google will not penalize AI-generated content that meets these criteria.
CreativeX have a recession playbook that's worth a read. Especially how Brands could deliver 12x ad profitability through improving the quality of their creative.
Why Proprietary Agency Tech isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.
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