Some Personal News
#13 Donor LTV: a deep dive
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SNAP!
Measuring Donor LTV: a deep dive
Smart SEO = better donor UX
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Let’s dig in!
News to Peruse
Meta launched its “Performance 5” framework, an attempt to share new insights to improve ad performance amid the platforms privacy and system overhauls.
Instagram is testing in-app content scheduling (grid posts and reels); could be a handy feature making it easier to edit and schedule posts on the fly.
YouTube got a facelift and the “Pinch to Zoom” feature is pretty neat.
TikTok launched automated Smart Performance Campaigns leveraging machine learning for ad targeting and optimization. Short ramp to get started - you just input a marketing objective, budget, country, and creative.
TikTok launched “TikTok Academy”, their marketing education platform.
TikTok just surpassed Netflix as the 2nd most popular app in the US with users under 35.
SNAP!
A friend and subscriber who runs performance marketing for a non-profit in Europe messaged me this week to tell me that Snap is crushing it for their RT campaigns. The 'RT' stands for retargeting.
With an AOV (average donation amount) of $116 USD, that's a great sign for Snapchat, despite their latest set of results showing their slowest rate of growth since 2017 when they went public.
With Snapchat, you'll likely have success looking for view-through conversions from a retargeting audience. Those are prospective donors who have been to your site before, you show them an ad, they watch it, don't need to click it, and Snap will help convert them a bit faster. A positive sign is seeing your time to donation get lowered when adding in Snapchat.
If you add a swipe up to Snapchat, make it easy. Don't make it your homepage, and don't make it the same landing page you would send Facebook/Google traffic to. It should have 1-3 options of where to click, or it should be email/phone collection to make it a quick experience.
How to Start Measuring Donor LTV
I’ve mentioned many times that tracking – and putting to use - Donor Lifetime Value (LTV) is crucial for most non-profit marketers when improving their digital fundraising performance. But how to do that without employing uncomfortable buzzwords like CDP, DMP, SFMC?!
In real life, LTV is the total donated amount that a given person contributes to your non-profit over time. In the digital world, it seems like the value over “as-long-as-possible-to-stitch-together timeframe and as-many-as-possible-to-connect separate donations...”
The number of devices those donors used, the content pillars they donated to, the variety of email addresses used, and the number of members in the household already make it no easy task. Add to that whether they’re a regular, monthly, or a random emergency donor – and you have a real mystery to solve. All those separate actions and digital identities make it more complex to collect that data and pass it between the systems for activation.
One important thought before we deep dive: Solving LTV in full (solution #4 below) is undoubtedly complex and will require a certain amount of budget invested, a larger support team, and time.
Option #1 below is what you already have – all you need is an installed Google Analytics entity to be up and running.
My intention with this newsletter is to help you improve your digital marketing and fundraising results right here and now, while also building a muscle together that allows us to tackle more on the complexity scale as the ROI from more accessible solutions funds that expansion. So, without further ado…
To solve this LTV puzzle, you can use several levels of complexity – and, accordingly, accuracy. Focus on ways that work not only for “measurement” (a more manageable task) but also for “activating” these insights in advertising. Below you’ll find my top 4 ways to tackle this issue, starting with the easiest.
1. COOKIES
If you haven’t heard the latest, Google recently announced pushing back its GA360 sunset date (again, the 4th time I can remember) to July 1st, 2024, instead of October 1st, 2023. Besides the fact that their engineering team is behind on the product roadmap, this also means that us users can keep relying on it a little longer.
While not ideal, Cookies are the easiest – and the most “default” – solution to go from measuring single donations to some “multi-donations” (they are too inaccurate to call it LTV yet).
Without any customization, your GA instance has two useful reports – Lifetime Value and User Explorer:
2. PLATFORM-BASED DEFINITION OF A USER
Most AdTech platforms have their way of conquering the Cookies phase-out. TheTradeDesk’s UID 2.0, Facebook’s estimated conversions, Liveramp, and others all fall into that category. However, one drawback of most of those solutions is that they are not meant for LTV measurement. Their sole purpose is to replace the “cross-device conversions” reports that show you whether a mobile ad impression converted to a transaction on the desktop device 12 hours later. It solves the Cookies phase-out implications for immediate measurement – but not for the long-term value question.
Analytics platforms have the upper hand here and Google is (again) the most accessible version for default. If you’ve already implemented GA4 alongside (or instead) of the “old” Google analytics version, you also have easily exportable LTV reports – but instead of Cookies, they are now based on “Signals.” Signals are Google’s login events and therefore are more accurate and durable.
You’ll get 80% of the value from LTV bidding with 20% of the effort using #1 & #2.
Solutions #3 and #4 are the ones to move on only when you hit diminishing returns. They’re much more complex but will uncover the remaining 20% of the value and propel your ROAS forward.
3. USER ID
For #3 and #4, let’s shift to the 1st Party definition of a user that comes from YOUR system. Your CRM – Blackbaud, SalesForce, Hubspot, or any other one – already tracks the “lifetime value” of your donors, stitching it based on their credit card, email, address, and other forms of PII. So, LTV is there, but how do you “act” on it? How to integrate it back into your Web Analytics and Media Buying platforms to use as signals for smart bidding?
Offline Uploads. In Google Analytics, there is a “User ID” functionality (don’t mix it with the Client ID from above – that one is based on cookies). User ID is meant to store login information and differentiate logged-in users on your website from from anonymous ones – but you can also use it to stitch many conversions into a proper version of LTV and then use it for revenue bidding in your advertising campaigns. The scheme of how that works is below:
4. DATA LAKE
While option #3 is accurate enough for automated bidding strategies, you need more than that if you’re trying to build a cross-channel automated marketing program. Ultimately, you’d need to tinker with the scheme above as follows:
This then allows you to enrich the data about donors with 2nd party signals and add in data from more channels such as Direct Mail or even F2F fundraising – and ultimately, serve as a centerpiece for your future Donor-Obsessed marketing algorithms.
Building a data lake can’t be covered in a single newsletter edition. A data engineering team will be a vital resource. By getting to this stage, you will effectively be building your in-house CDP – Collecting, Integrating, Analyzing, and Activating 1st party donor data.
Positive surprises will be a price tag – it’s much cheaper than a black-box CDP costing >$2M over two years – and you’ll have control of the data, which will make your digital programs effectively invincible regardless of what happens to cookies or the wider industry.
The Bottom Line
The 4 solutions above all solve the same problem at different budgets and effort levels – and most programs don’t need solutions #3 and #4 to be successful. Using #2 alongside the custom bidding algorithms in Google Ads we’ve covered in earlier newsletter editions will already place you in the top 5% of the best-performing accounts across all industries in Google Ads.
Internal Linking Drives Better Donor UX
Insight from a Clearscope webinar
Internal links can radically improve donor experience and overall SEO health.
Use the "ICARE" (or ERICA) framework to reap the benefits: Intent, Context, Anchor text, Relevance, External link authority.
1. Intent: Link to pages that readers expect
For example: "Strong donor relationships lead to better fundraising outcomes."
Correct: Link out to > “Guide to Donor Relations” page
Incorrect: Link out to > your organization’s Giving Tuesday campaign page
Link to pages that build on donor intent.
2. Context: Don't match keywords; match context
Correct: Put your mission at the center of your donor strategy
Incorrect: Our donor strategy is built around topic clusters
Link out to > How to Create a Donor-First Strategy
Google understands the context surrounding links. So make sure the pages you link to are contextually relevant.
3. Anchor text: Use keywords
Correct: “If you publish health content, you need to know what E-A-T is”.
Incorrect: “If you publish health content, you need to know what E-A-T is”.
Link to > What is E-A-T & Why it's Important
The former satisfies intent, context, and targets a great keyword. The latter satisfies none of those things.
4. Relevance: Add links where they're relevant
Ideally, links are related to the main topic of the page. In a section on your the impact of your Programs, you'd want to link to pages about the impact of your Programs.
5. External link authority: Link from high authority pages
Lastly, if you can't find linking opportunities that line up with the first four criteria, your best bet is to link out from pages with the most backlinks.
Interesting Reads This Week:
The practice of “aizuchi”: A cool read even if you’re not into Japanese culture.
There has never been a better time with lower barriers, higher benefit/risk ratios, better returns, greater upside, than now: Right now, this minute.
A punchy article on trend-following in venture capital: the importance of thinking for yourself.
Bloomberg Businessweek commissioned a cover-to-cover issue for only the second time in it’s history this week. A sober guide on what crypto and blockchain means and why is matters. Available now in digital, in-print tomorrow.
These took minutes to bake and are delicious: healthy fats, lots of protein and some of the best superfoods for breakfast.
Digital Marketing and Fundraising Jobs:
American Forests: Senior Director, Digital Marketing
Amnesty International: Head of Digital Engagement
Color of Change: Digital Fundraising Director
Comic Relief: Director of Fundraising
Diabetes UK: Digital Product Owner
Food Bank for New York City: Vice President, Individual Giving Fundraising
Kiva.org: Vice President, Business Development
NYC Tech Alliance: Executive Director
Save the Children Action Network (“SCAN”): Senior Advisor, Digital Campaigns
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How could I help you? I use my experience, expertise and network to help mission-driven organizations solve interesting problems and grow.
See you next week!
P.S. Don’t forget about Bing in your media mix.