Giving guides - Facebook

Along with GWWC, we tested marketing and messaging themes on Facebook in their Effective Giving Guide Facebook Lead campaigns. Across four trials we compared the effectiveness of different types of (1) messages, (2) videos, and (3) targeted audiences.

A summary of this has been shared as a post on the EA Forum:

We build the results and analysis transparently in the EAMT Analysis web-book here.

Context: Facebook ads on a range of audiences

... [with text and rich content promoting effective giving and a "giving guide" -- links people to a Giving What We Can page asking for their email in exchange for the guide]

Objective: Test distinct aiming to get people to download our Giving Guide. A key comparison:

Also informative about costs and the 'value of targeting different groups' in this context.

Key findings:

  • The cost of an email address via a Facebook campaign during Giving Season was .

  • Only 3% of people give effectively,” seems to be an effective message for generating link clicks and email addresses, relative to the other messages.

  • Lookalike and animal rights audiences seem to be the most promising audiences.

  • Demographics are not very predictive on a per-$ basis.

Key caveats

Specificity and interpretation: All comparisons are not for 'audiences of similar composition' but for 'the best audience Facebook could find to show the ads, within each group, according to its algorithm'. Thus, differences in performance may combine 'better targeting' with 'better performance on the targeted group'. See our discussion of the 'divergent delivery' problem HERE. I.e., we can make statements about "what works better on Facebook in this context and maybe similar contexts", , as the targeting within each audience may differ in unobserved ways.

The outcome is 'click to download the giving guide'.

Previous writeup and results

Link to the previous Gdoc report

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