Some Personal News #3
Silver bullets, Fundamentals and Sandcastles
Happy Sunday!
Last week I promised you a deep dive on how to align your Display efforts with your SEM. You’ll find it under bullet 2. This week we're also (trying not to) chasing silver bullets and proposing a simple ad copy test that could drive a healthy impact.
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Let’s dig in!
News to Peruse
Google announced some improvements to search results, like consensus-based featured snippets and context-heavier “about this result” text (found by clicking on the three dots next to a search result).
Meta released Advantage+ globally. Fundraisers can use it to cut out manual ad creation and automate up to 150 creative combinations.
LinkedIn is upping its game. What’s new: carousels, post templates, and you can now add links to images and videos.
1. NOTE TO SELF: Stop chasing silver bullets and embrace solid fundamentals
The more tactics I test in my effort to connect revenue and brand marketing full funnel, the more I realize there are no silver bullets.
It’s about an ecosystem of effort, coordinating and pulling everything together.
It’s not LinkedIn ads in isolation.
It’s not brand in isolation.
It’s not Google search ads in isolation.
It’s not organic social in isolation.
It’s not SEO in isolation.
It’s not messaging in isolation.
It’s not email in isolation.
It’s not podcasting in isolation.
It’s not events in isolation.
It’s not positioning in isolation.
It’s everything working in harmony. It’s choosing a few things that make the most sense based on your proposition and audience, and going deep.
Prove those out, have them all work together, and go deeper into them.
Then layer on more only once you have the core running. In these precious weeks left ahead of the final quarter, now’s the time to invest in getting the core built, tested and humming.
Consistent execution of marketing fundamentals > chasing silver bullets.
2. How to align your Display efforts with your SEM: step-by-step
Once you’ve identified your best donors in Google Analytics, proved the CVR increase with retargeting efforts, and kicked off the first Look-a-Like campaign, the time has come to think about channel expansion. But how can you deliver without breaking your return on ad spend (ROAS)?
Rather than look at a marketing funnel, let’s flip it into a “donor timeline”. Even our best donors aren’t ready to donate at any given moment in time – their intent needs to come together with what Google calls a “micro-moment”, the time when people are the most receptive to your messaging. The data I’ve looked at for the past 6 years pretty consistently suggests there’s about 5 steps to new donor readiness in the 4th quarter of the year:
60 days before the first donation – prospective donors don’t know of their intent or perhaps even your existence yet
30 days before the donation – prospective donors know of your existence but aren’t ready to make a move yet
14 days before the donation – prospective donors “aligning themselves” with your mission and are considering their first donation
1 day before the donation – prospective donors have an intent to make their first donation
1 hour before the donation – prospective donors are doing their last bit of research to ensure they aren’t making a mistake
Your goal is to be present and helpful to donors across every step of this journey:
This is where we can use Display and SEM to help one another.
Most fundraisers get it wrong by starting their planning efforts channel-first. It needs to be donor-first.
Then channel expansion becomes easy since the only thing we need to figure out is…targeting criteria in every channel to reach the same person!
Google Ads has a very helpful “audience composition” functionality. It’s even more robust in Display&Video 360 – Google’s enterprise-level Display buying platform – but Google Ads is a good starting point. Using these reports for our Look-a-Like campaigns allows for building more controllable campaigns.
Below are screenshots of my favorite dimensions and report setup options:
By segmenting your Look-a-Like campaigns by Audience Segments, Keywords, and Topics, you identify different descriptors – and all of them represent your best donors, they’re just different ways to reach them. Sequentially, those different descriptors work better at different stages of the funnel ;)
Make the synergy between Intent and Micro-Moments work for your benefit
So the >winning composition< of SEM & Display Google Ads that meet the need of the donor at every step of their timeline, while also running a mile from straight up black-box look-a-like targeting should look like this:
60 days before the first donation – Display campaign with the Audience targeting as the broadest, cheapest option. Creative messaging around your brand and its purpose.
30 days before the donation – Display campaign with the Topics targeting. Creative messaging around pillars associated with those topics.
14 days before the donation – SEM Non-Branded campaign with targeting phrase match donation keywords and overlapping Audience segments from step #1.
1 day before the donation – Display campaign with the Custom Intent targeting to reach those same SEM searchers. Creative messaging around the Journey of a Dollar (what’s the impact of a donated dollar with your organization?).
1 hour before the donation – SEM Branded campaign with targeting phrase and exact match keywords associated with your brand.
This approach never failed me – it always boosted the performance of Look-a-Likes and increased scale/revenue exponentially.
3. Use shorter ad copy for retargeting campaigns
Insight from Daniel Hegman.
Here’s a quick test that might increase Meta retargeting conversions:
Shorten your ad copy.
Sounds ridiculously simple, and it is. But many fundraisers retarget with long-form ad copy - and it might be bringing down conversion.
Take a look at the numbers below from ad copy split tests run for a fashion retailer. I love to copy and test into what other industries are seeing. Donors are buying clothes online too… Short ad copy - copy that fit on one line on Meta - consistently drove more clicks for retargeted users than long-form copy (64% vs. 36%).
Compare that to prospecting campaigns, where clicks from short-form and long-form copy were equally split.
A theory behind the difference:
Retargeted users are often already aware of your brand and mission. They’re higher intent and don’t need as much education, so they react better to shorter messages.
New prospects need more education - so longer ad copy might be necessary.
Test for next week: short vs. long-form copy in a retargeting campaign to see if you get a similar conversion improvement.
Interesting Reads This Week:
Execution matters. A lot. Some math that quantifies just how much https://every.to/divinations/execution-is-exponential
A dear friend of this newsletter and I chatted some time ago about Apple’s next monetization play (paywall link) and how Ads will play a huge role. And it’s now happening. There’s likely a big opportunity, and it’s untapped by non-profits right now, to go prospect in Apple’s burgeoning demand side play https://digiday.com/media/apple-is-building-a-demand-side-platform/
As the summer season winds down, I’m planning my last trips to the beach. It took me a rather long time as a child to figure out that building really good sandcastles required sand that’s wet but not too wet. I’d never thought about why any amount of water can turn sand into the stuff of miniature turrets, parapets and castle gates until I read this - it’s off topic for this newsletter but absolutely fascinating, so forgive me! https://theconversation.com/sandcastle-engineering-a-geotechnical-engineer-explains-how-water-air-and-sand-create-solid-structures-188208