“What should be my daily spend on Facebook?”
“I want to start small and then grow gradually.”
These are some of the common questions that I come across. By the time monthly or daily media spends are discussed most of the talks drop especially with non-profits.
Recently an NGO got in touch with me with the below brief:
Campaign: Click to Donate(One Off)
Duration: 3 months
Platform: Meta(Facebook and Instagram)
Creatives: No videos
Daily budget: USD 125 or INR 10,000 daily(approx)
ROI: 1.4 to 1.5
After some thinking, I wasn’t keen to explore the project. Obviously, I could have made money but the campaign wouldn’t work out for the following reasons:
Creatives
At least have videos(15 or 6 seconds) when you are running any kind of campaign on Meta. If you upload stills on Facebook, the platform provides creative suggestions on how to add music and convert it like a video or a Reel. I am ignoring any or all creative+ suggestions from Meta.
So a good creative mix is to have 2 or 3 videos along with one or two stills. At any given point have 5 creatives live and running.
Daily budget
This is the tricky bit but one needs to have a decent media budget especially when the campaign objective is “Traffic” which is basically driving traffic from FB and Instagram to a donation page or a landing page.
Your daily budget defines two very important things:
Ad sets: Your daily budget will define how many ad sets you can build while you launch a campaign. For instance, with a daily budget of INR 20,000, I have the ability to build 4 more ad sets. However, if I have a daily budget of INR 5,000, Meta will only allow me to build a limited no of ad sets which could be 2 or 3. Additionally as a rule I keep my ad sets to four. More ad sets and creatives mean further distribution of the daily budget.
Audience size: For a market like India, the audience pool size is huge. With a greater media budget, Meta will allow you greater link clicks. For a traffic campaign, you would want a big reach and pool size of link clicks driving donations. The below screengrab shows how the daily media spends define estimated daily returns.
Cause
The success of a click-to-donate campaign depends upon a variety of things such as creatives, audience targeting, media spending, donation page, and the cause for the fundraising. In other words, awareness is required. For instance, in India, people are okay with donating to save tigers but when it comes to snow leopards it is a big question. The reason is that most of us are unaware of the mysterious species and the challenges they are facing.
ROI
One of the factors that define ROI is your daily media spending. Including all the other factors that I have discussed above. Achieving 1.4 to 1.5 is impossible for the campaign to achieve with the current brief and that’s why I was hesitant and shared the risks the campaign involved with the client.
The discussion died at this point. But I am okay. Setting the right expectations is important.
I am not saying that with limited media spending, you can’t achieve results. But you will have to define your expectations accordingly. So decide your media budget and then find out from your consultant or digital team what could be the expected results while keeping in mind all the above factors.
Hey PN!
I just wanted to start off by thanking you for sharing your incredible analysis with me. It was really helpful!
However, I do have a few doubts regarding the ROI calculation that you presented. I was hoping you could help me out with them.
1. Could you please let me know what the average donation size was and how you arrived at this figure? I'm also curious to know if there was any historical data or methodology behind it.
2. I was wondering if you used direct website links for donations or third-party landing pages like lead pages or Unbounce to conduct A/B tests for donation optimisation.
3. Lastly, I wondered if you considered monthly recurring donations in your campaign analysis or if it was solely focused on one-time donations. If so, what was the outcome of this strategy?
Thanks a lot for your help!