19 Tips to Maximise your Facebook Ads for Giving Tuesday

 With Giving Tuesday upon us, we have jotted down 19 top tips in easy-to-print format to make sure your Facebook Ads work hard for you! These are based from working with over 60 charity clients on our Digital Fundraising Mastermind

#1 - Don’t Use Your Personal Profile Ad Account, Make Sure You’re Using Business Manager

If you haven’t already, create a business manager account for your organisation. The main reason to do this is if you are running ads from a personal account and Facebook shut down your account (which happens!) then you will still be able to run ads. This will centralise access to your advertising accounts and Facebook pages. It will also separate your employees personal Facebook profiles from what they do for your organisation. There is no longer any need to have a separate Facebook profile for work. You can set permissions for your employees to access your ad account and pages and maintain important business information such as payment information. Also - top tip. Create one or two empty ad accounts so if one gets closed you can still advertise.

#2 - Pixel On EVERY Page

You should install the Facebook Pixel across EVERY page of EVERY website your organisation owns. Your charity should only have one pixel that way there is more data centralised in one place which will help your ads perform better.

#3 - Go Earlier

On one off days like Giving Tuesday it's hard to warm up audiences on the day so consider running ads for the 2-3 days leading up. You'll need to think about how to phase your spending over the days leading up and then on the day itself.

#4 - Don’t Boost! Use The Conversion Objective

Giving Tuesday is one day of the year when you definitely want conversion! Make sure you choose the conversion objective when creating a campaign. You can’t do this by boosting! When you choose the conversion objective Facebook will find people who are likely to convert within your target audience. Remember you can use custom conversions to tell Facebook what a conversion is. I.e. the landing page, donation form or the thank you page.

#5 - Split Out Your Cold And Warm Audiences

Split out your warm custom audiences from the colder lookalike audiences to give you a more accurate view of performance and to make sure Facebook can optimise correctly for each audience.

#6 - Go BIG With Audiences

Contrary to what you are taught in most marketing courses, when choosing audiences on Facebook, the larger more broader audiences are usually better. Even though Facebook has an amazing targeting feature to narrow down your audience it is often better to use a broader audience and let Facebook’s optimisation find the right people for a lower cost.

#7 - Custom Lookalike Audiences

Rather than starting with interest / demographics based audiences. You should test LAL (Lookalike) audiences for prospecting to cold audiences. LAL audiences are only as good as the custom audiences they are based on. These should be of significant size, preferably over 10K in order to give Facebook enough data to create an accurate lookalike.

#8 - Stop the Scroll with Your Ad Creative

With Ads we need Creative. Not any old content. There’s a difference. You need to make sure your Creative is standing out and grabbing people’s attention in the Facebook Newsfeed. Especially on mobile. Movement and video are great for this.

#9 - Inspire Them to Act

Have one clear and strong call to action, communicate this as early as possible in the video. Also, make sure your call to action is very specific and clear. It’s not just “Give Now” it’s “Click here to buy a gift now in our online gift shop” (you get the idea)

#10 - Short Video Ads Work Best (On The Whole)

Make sure your Video Ads are under thirty seconds, this makes them easier to produce and lowers production costs. This is more effective in direct response advertising than longer more traditional videos. These should be designed specifically for Facebook rather than videos that are used across all of your channels.

#11 - Use Kinetic Text

We recommend animated text which is overlaid on videos, it allows you to tell the story much faster and in a clearer way. These aren’t subtitles. It’s ok for them to cover part of the video and should appear word by word and not in blocks of text.

#12 - Placements

We recommend using Facebook News Feed only for your ad placements. This helps if you have limited creative and makes sure that you're getting the most for your budget. There are exceptions to this rule especially if you're spending large budgets but for most charities this is where we'd recommend you start.

#13 - Avoid Being Too Clever

Don’t try and be too clever with Ad formats like Canvas and Placements like video. Giving Tuesday is just one day of the year, so you don’t really have time to waste testing unproven things. Keep it simple.

#14 - Get More Control Over Testing Creative

There are many different ways to test your ads on Facebook. Not all are accurate and give you the control you need. By using one creative “concept” per ad set it allows you to determine the best creative audience combinations. You can then scale much faster with the accurate information.

#15 - Custom Conversions

You don’t need overly complex tracking to do successful Facebook Advertising. The easiest and most simple way to track and measure on Facebook is to use custom conversions rather than standard events. This requires no coding or development other than placing the pixel on every page of your website.

#16 - Measure (only) What Matters

Using the customise column feature in the ads manager you should be able to measure all of the correct metrics such as CPM, CTR, CPL and CPA. Most charities will be going for donations and so the main metric you need to optimise for is Cost Per Acquisition (CPA).

#17 - Retarget Abandoners

A key part of any campaign is the retargeting to those users that did not complete the action that you asked them to complete. So often we think people abandoned the transaction because they weren’t interested when in reality they were distracted or interrupted. They are a hugely valuable audience. All they need is another little nudge.

#18 - Remember - It’s Still a “Value Exchange”

Even though this is a popular day for charity giving, you still need to make sure you are meeting the “value exchange threshold”. Think about ways you can add value by including a matched gift, any potential tax benefits or even a physical gift. e.g. wristband, t-shirt or tote bag. If you can do a match, introduce urgency.

#19 - Sort Out The Right Payment Methods

Most advertisers pay for Facebook adverts by using a credit card. As soon as possible you should try and move to direct debit or PayPal that way you can increase your available campaign budget. The worst thing that can happen is you have to stop your successful campaign right in the middle of Giving Tuesday because the credit card is maxed out.

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RAISETHRU helps amazing organisations scale their Facebook Advertising. We’ve worked with some of the biggest charity brands such as Greenpeace and UNICEF as well as much smaller organisations on our Digital Fundraising Mastermind.