Your questions answered: digital diversification

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You can view a copy of our free digital diversification guide here or access the full Q&A here.

"What are your thoughts on the ever-lasting challenge of balancing awareness vs. conversion? Our fundraising budget is focused on income generation and it can be difficult to get this right—awareness alone isn't enough, we need to demonstrate ROI."

Getting your measures of success as clear as possible in these cases is the important thing. With digital, it’s easy to think that everything needs to generate return immediately because everything is so measurable. But having your funnel worked out can open new possibilities for awareness led activity. Some channels will be better at this than others, too. YouTube campaigns will achieve some of the lowest cost per completed video views across all channels, digital or otherwise. If you need to tell an emotional story this is going to be the most effective way to do that. But ultimately, you need some evidence that people are meaningfully interacting with that story too, and secondary metrics like landing page engagement will need to be considered in these cases. 

"Do you have any tips for campaign setup to approach creative testing on Meta with our always-on programme? (Not using DCO flexible ads so we can control the creative and copy? Should we consider budget split or capping, A/B testing?)"

Dynamic creative optimisation can be a really effective way of finding the most effective combination of assets quickly. We tend to use it when we have our strongest fundraising proposition worked out and want to fine tune some of the creative elements, for instance colour or wording. But we don’t use it so much in the early stages of creative testing, where it’s important to learn for yourself which conceptual approaches work best. In these stages you will get better insight if you can guarantee a post copy will appear alongside a certain artwork. With performance max, you can’t fix creative elements together which is why we tend to test YouTube videos as standalone first. 

"What sort of videos can work best in terms of content? Would you advise creating new content or trying to re-use existing content?" 

This is going to vary across channels. Of course you want platform-first creative to get the best results but there are some shortcuts you can use. For more “traditional” paid social content, things can generally be resized and repurposed. It’s probably a bigger job to make a TV ad work hard for online film - but it can be done. However, For something like TikTok you’re probably going to need to work from the ground up with UGC. But once you do get that to work, you can then re-use it across more UGC led channels like Reels or YouTube shorts. 

"When you find your best-performing creative on Meta, can you feel confident that it will translate to other platforms, or do you need to retest on each platform (or start again and be platform-first) when spending outside of Meta?" 

If you want to test an idea in Meta before rolling out to other channels you absolutely need to make sure that what you are testing is transferable. These initial tests should be top-level territory/propositions that speak about different areas of an organisation’s work, or present the same things conceptually very differently. This way, you can be sure that what you are testing is the idea, rather than something more superficial that could be more to do with a platform best practice. 

"We have used Advantage on several fundraising campaigns and it has driven the CPA up so high that we had to switch it off. What are we doing wrong?" 

Advantage , Meta’s in-platform name for its automated media buying setting can be really effective. Generally, we see it working well. But you can check in on what it’s doing if you are unsure about whether it’s having a positive effect on performance. You can always break down where your ads have shown and what the results have been for those placements or audiences after the campaign has delivered. And if for some reason automation isn’t driving performance, turning it off is totally valid. 

Have you tested much with campaign level negative keywords on pMax to avoid overlap with search (especially brand search)?

Answering this question thoroughly could get technical quite quickly, but in short, yes. Negative keywords and certain scripts to guide p-max’s decision making are some of the only media buying levers you can actually pull so it’s a great idea to make use of them. Get in touch if you'd like a more detailed response!

For charities that can't afford to create lots of different videos, what would be your recommendation for creative diversity?

Creative diversity (Meta’s recommended creative approach) is all about having a suite of assets that are as distinct as one another as possible, to give the algorithm the best chance of finding the optimal message and targeting. This can be done on a shoestring, but you might have to think outside of the box with it. What are some totally different ways you could look at a proposition with just a static image? You could try real life images, graphic approaches and totally different phrasing of a proposition, for instance.

How do you tend to deal with cross-channel attribution questions when running an ad suite across multiple platforms?

There’s never going to be a single source of truth when it comes to attribution - and any system like last click/data driven attribution or marketing mix modelling will have different perspectives - all of which are valid as long as you are aware of their limitations. Take some in-platform numbers with a pinch of salt, as some will take more credit than they deserve. 

After focussing on Meta campaigns for a long time and looking to venture into Reddit as a new channel. What do we need to focus on in starting this up?

Reddit is a fantastic channel as you can reach people in contextual environments that they are interested in at that moment, lending it well to more niche propositions. Creatively, it’s a lot of fun too as Meme references are encouraged to make the content native. As with a lot of ad platforms, Reddit has a publicly available ad library so do check that out for inspiration. It’s a good idea to have a look at what commercial advertisers are doing as the e-commerce brands are often further ahead with optimised strategies than the charity sector. 

Thank you to everyone who registered for the event and came along to ask their questions. You can access the recording of the Q&A here.

If you’d like to move in the right direction in 2025, our team can help with digital diversification, generating leads with our new dialogue model, or highlighting programme gaps - and opportunities - with ‘Plan to Grow’

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